As the last one of our bonus episodes for Season 1 of the Book Launch Show, Valerie gets to interview one of Tim’s certified book launch coaches, Sue Campbell. She has many years’ experience helping writers get their books marketed and sold, and being a novelist herself, Sue understands the writing process and the obstacles that indie writers are confronted with. Today she walks us through the process of making the first contact with a writer and what the initial considerations should be, including making sure that the client’s website and signup incentives are well set up. We also talk about blogging and whether it’s really necessary for writers to spend hours creating content that might not be read and talk about Amazon and other platforms and how marketing on them should be approached. Sue also shares why writers have to market their own books, take responsibility for the outreach process and the various ways that having a coach can help them be more successful. Don’t miss out on the very last episode of Season 1!

Key Points from This Episode:

• A consultation call as the first step for writers and book marketers to get into contact.
• Using Tim’s connection system and organizing tasks in the right buckets.
• Permission assets to consider: the writer’s website, signup incentives and email. 
• What the bare bones of your website entail.
• Why blogging is not something every writer should do and what to save your content for.
• The type of questions to ask a book launch coach before starting off.
• Why Sue’s group coaching is a more viable and beneficial option for many writers.
• Long and short term strategies and why Amazon or the next big platform is not everything.
• Why it is absolutely crucial for writers to do their own marketing.
• Practical advice for writers who are pressed for time and how coaches can help them.
• Switching between micro and macro view and how they always have to be connected.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Sue Campbell — https://www.pagesandplatforms.com/book-marketing/

Steven Pressfield — https://stevenpressfield.com/

[0:00:00.3] VF: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Valerie Francis and this week, in the final bonus episode of the season, I’m chatting with one of Tim’s certified book launch coaches, Sue Campbell. I know I’m pretty lucky to have access to Tim every week. I really do know that. Many of you have told me that this podcast is helping you with your own book marketing. But there are only so many hours in the day and sooner or later, you’re going to need to hire help.

When that time comes, you need to know what kinds of things a book marketer can and can’t do for you and what questions you need to ask before hiring them. That’s what this episode is all about. Sue has 10 years’ experience as a content marketer and she’s a novelist in her own right. She knows what kinds of challenges we’re facing.

She was kind enough to sit down with me and chat about some of the things she does with clients and what we, as fiction writers, can expect when we work with a pro. Okay, let’s jump in to the episode and get started.

[INTRO]

[0:01:04.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:11.6] VF: Today, I have with me, one of Tim’s certified book launch coaches. Sue Campbell, how are you, Sue?

[0:01:18.3] SC: I’m great Valerie, how are you today?

[0:01:20.3] VF: I’m fine, thank you. I wanted to talk to one of the certified coaches because it can be really intimidating for an author who is sort of really busy just trying to learn how to write the book to then wrap their heads around marketing. Lots of times, well, for me anyway, in my situation. But also with a lot of the writers that I know, we didn’t even know what questions to ask someone who knew about book marketing, we didn’t know if the person knew what they were talking about.

We were just coming at it so cold that it was completely overwhelming. I thought it might be kind of fun to just have a chat about that it’s like to be a certified book launch coach, the types of things that you can do for writers when you’re working with them and all that kind of stuff, sounds good?

[0:02:13.9] SC: That sounds great.

[0:02:14.5] VF: All right. Well let’s start at the beginning. When you work with a client, when someone calls you and said they want to work with you. Where do you start with them, what’s step one?

[0:02:27.4] SC: Step one is just a free phone call, right? I just hop on the phone with someone. If they have time, they can send me any information and then email ahead of time about their particular situation. But I really just want to get on the phone and see where they’re at with their book marketing and then I always give them an overview of the connection system, right?

Tim’s beautiful connection system which should be your underlying strategy for everything. I walk them through to make sure we’re on the same page about the kind of approach that we’d be taking if we work together. That’s step one. I get to know about them, their book, their career, what do they want out of the book, right? Not just about how many copies do you want to sell, you know, how do you want someone to feel at the end of the book. Five years from now, what do you want the book to be doing? Where do you want it to be, who do you want to have read it? All of those kinds of things. That’s how it usually starts.

[0:03:24.8] VF: When you explain the connection system to people, can you see the light bulb going on for them?

[0:03:29.1] SC: I can see the lightbulb going on but there usually is the process of just getting familiar with the pieces and how does what you’ve been doing or what you think you have to do, how does that fit in, right? Valerie, I’m a great listener to the podcast so in that early episodes when you were trying to say, okay, this is content or this is outreach or this is permission and Tim was like no, that’s really common and –

It just takes a little getting used to, to try to put things into the right bucket, right? What I like to tell people too and maybe I’m jumping ahead here is your permission, you’re going to set it and forget it, right? You’re going to get it set up and then you’re going to focus on other areas.

You're going to be delivering content to the people on your list but really, what I want people to do is put most of their energy into outreach and the content that you’re developing should be going into your outreach channels because that’s where the growth is.

[0:04:32.4] VF: All right, building on that, when you deal with a writer, where do you start with them, once you’ve had your consultation call, do you start with the permission like the getting the email list setup and organized on their site, is that where you start?

[0:04:46.6] SC: It depends on the writer, but let’s pretend just for the sake of helping somebody who is starting from ground zero. If we were doing one on one work together, it would be kind of similar to what you and Tim are doing, right? We start with the permission, every time. I’ll go through an audit and make sure that they have what they need to have.

Do they have a website, does it look decent, right? It doesn’t have to be super big and fancy, it needs to look professional but it can be very simple and spare, really. Do they have enough places where the signup form is appearing. Do they have a good signup incentive that’s actually tied to the book that they’re writing, right? Or the book that they’re promoting or launching.

Looking at all of those permission assets and making sure they’re setup well, do they have a welcome email sequence that works, right? Can we improve any of these pieces, can we tweak them so that they convert better or they speak to the right people more effectively?

[0:05:46.4] VF: Now, when you’re talking to them about their website, because you know, Sue, I nearly went bananas working online, because I had my site developed organically. I think I started it in 2011 and it was just a blog, right? I sort of started to build pieces on it as I went along. It was very much a patch work quilt, it’s a necessary evil.

I kind of look at it like my taxes, right? I don’t want to spend a lot of time at it, I just have to do it. The sooner I can get to the point where I can offload it to someone else, the happier I am. When Tim was working with me, I mean, the first thing we had to do was kind of untangle the mess that I had or the thing that didn’t really fit together very well.

We had to sort all that out first. That took a while. If someone is starting from scratch, you said a minute ago, it doesn’t have to be a fancy website, it can be a bare bones site, what is bare bones to you?

[0:06:45.4] SC: Bare bones, I can talk about it briefly and then I actually do have an article about what do you actually need for your author website.

[0:06:52.5] VF: Okay.

[0:06:53.1] SC: Bare bones is you need a home page, obviously, you need to have a mailing list setup, you need an about page, about you as the author, you need a book description page and you need to have a place where they can contact you, book you for events that kind of thing. That’s really about it.

You can have a blog; you don’t have to have a blog. Again, depending on what you’re writing about, who you are as a person, how much you like blogging, these would be things that we would talk about to figure out if you should have a blog or not. Not every writer needs to.

[0:07:30.6] VF: Right, these are things that Tim and I were trying to hash out as well. You know, I had a blog and I was used to blogging and I did it, I did it consistently when I first started because that’s all it was. It wasn’t anything else. But I’m glad to hear you say that it isn’t necessary when you start. Because this is – I keep coming back to the word overwhelming because that is the feeling I have all the time in this industry, right?

We start out and all we want to do is write stories, that’s it. We discovered that that thing grows. It’s not just about sitting down and writing a book, you got to learn how to write the book and that requires all this big study and then you got to learn how to sell the book and that requires a whole bunch of big study and a whole bunch of stuff to learn.

It’s not a learning curve, it’s a vertical line straight up all the time. I really like what you’re saying that you don’t have to go from zero to a hundred immediately, you can start with the bare essentials of a website and add to it as you go, right?

[0:08:38.4] SC: Yes, the part of the problem with saying I have to have a blog, is as a writer, you’re going to make sure that blog is great and you’re going to invest a bunch of time in writing blogpost that nobody’s going to see. Because you haven’t built an audience yet. You're going to get exhausted on content that isn’t really going to serve you because there’s no one there to see it.

That’s why I like to save your content juice for your outreach efforts, right? Go and write a guest post on somebody else’s blog who already has the type of audience you want. Don’t burn yourself out on your own site when there’s nobody there. You know, craft beautiful talking points for the podcast that you’re going to go on or make videos that you could put out and distribute through someone else or interviews where you’re capturing someone else’s audience, right?

Otherwise, you’re just going to burn out, you’re not going to have time for marketing and you’re going to say it doesn’t work, right? Because I did all of that and no one’s finding me, right? Because you're not going out and doing the outreach. That is the danger of websites and blogs is that they’re a great place to honor resistance, to give in to resistance, right?

[0:09:51.4] VF: That’s right.

[0:09:52.3] SC: Cause you can tell yourself, you’re doing something but really, you are just wasting your energy because you’re scared to go out into the outreach.

[0:09:59.8] VF: When someone approaches you or if someone listening to this is thinking, you know, I would really love to work with a book launch coach, what kinds of questions should they be asking when they contact  you or someone who can help them?

[0:10:12.8] SC: Well, first you want to make sure that the person actually has an underlying strategy, right? That they’re not just spouting all the latest tactics that you can just Google and read, right? What’s the underlying strategy that you’re using, why are you using it, how has it worked well for other clients, those types of questions. The other thing I really want to get at for most writers, most of us, I’m a writer too.

Our B and C list writers. Most writers are not going to be able to hire me to do an entire book launch for them, right? They certainly aren’t going to be able to afford to hire Tim to do one. What can that coach do for you that can get you further down the road for a decent amount of money.

When I trained under Tim, I was so excited to help fiction authors, right? Fiction authors aren’t where the money is for book launch coaches, right? It’s the business books and the big launches of nonfiction that are the most lucrative, because those are the people who get the good advances and can reinvest that money into a book launch.

I was very disappointed to hear this. I was cracking my head, trying to figure out, well, how can I also work with fiction authors? I love nonfiction too but I’m a fiction writer, how can I help my people? I put together like group coaching, right? Look for a way that you can leverage other people and you all pay in a little bit instead of writing one monster check yourself and then you also can leverage the brain power of that group of people and you get even more eyes on your stuff.

More people saying, have you thought of this person as an influencer? You can really leverage hive mind and get the absolute most bang for your buck with group coaching. That’s what I started doing for fiction authors, in particular but nonfiction people are also in my group coaching. Talk to that coach and see how flexible they are with the type of writer you are and the type of time that you have and the type of marketing mindset that you have, right?

If they are just full steam ahead with all of these Amazon tactics and meta data and all the stuff, is that really a fit for you, right? You have to evaluate any coach that you're talking to, one to one to see if you can work well together.

[0:12:38.8] VF: As a coach, do you behave the way Tim is with me, like Tim isn’t actually doing the work for me, he’s saying, he’s pointing me in a direction and saying, go forth, go do it and come back. Is that how you deal with your clients?

[0:12:54.5] SC: It depends on the clients. I offer sort of from soup to nuts, right? Some of my clients, we just talk on the phone, maybe once a month and we say, what have you done since the last time we talked, what are the results you’ve gotten from it, okay, now go do this. Very much like what you and Tim do.

Then there are other folks who they’ve got a book launch coming up and they need help at like actually executing on their big list of stuff that needs to happen. I will also get down in the weeds and have all your passwords and be helping you with social and helping you create images in Canva and along with all those strategy pieces, just helping you to actually execute as well.

I think most of our coaches are probably like that where they have a range of things but they’ll do and it depends on the client and the budget and some other factors.

[0:13:43.7] VF: One of the reasons I kept getting confused and overwhelmed is because a lot of what we’re hearing in you know, the community. Just sort of listening to what others are saying as they’re trying to learn. A lot of what I was hearing, although I didn’t understand it at the time, was about tactics and it was a lot about gaming the system and it was all about Amazon algorithm and you know in sheer frustration one day I said, “Well who cares? Well surely this can’t be a winning long term strategy” and that is just my gut instinct speaking because it certainly wasn’t experience or knowledge. It was just gut instinct. It didn’t make sense to me because when I go into Amazon or Kobo or whomever, usually I go in looking for a particular author.

I am not going in there just to see what pops up or do you know look at the also bots or that kind of stuff. I am going in to look for someone in particular or a particular book and when I came across Tim, he was one of the very few people who was talking about this bigger picture strategy, right? And since then, I learned about Seth Godin who is even more global because he is talking across all industries whereas Tim is just speaking to our industry.

When you’re dealing with clients, how many of them come in, because when I am talking to people I feel a little bit like a lone wolf when I talk about bigger picture marketing strategies because immediately people want to talk to me about how to tweak my keywords, how to fix my author page, how to – I got to publish every 30 days or whatever. I don’t even know if the publish every 30 days is still a thing. It used to be a thing. I just stopped listening to all of that.

So when clients come to you, is that still the mindset or have people woken up a little bit and thought, “Okay wait a minute, let us look at something a little more long term or are they still looking for the quick hits?

[0:15:47.5] SC: Well, it is kind of half and half because a lot of the people who find me, fine me through Tim. So they’re already drinking that particular wonderfully flavored cool aid but there are people who find me through other channels and they are almost always fixated on social media, right? That I have to have a big Twitter following or I have to start a Facebook group or they are very social media focused and they are somewhat concerned about Amazon keywords and things.

But that is almost too scary to think about. So that’s often where we are starting and I have to start by debunking the idea that social media sells books because it doesn’t. So we start talking, again I bring them back to the big picture of the connection system and why are we using the connection system. Well because if someone reads your book, you want them to also read your next book, right? It’s not just about the splash in the pan, I am only writing one book.

You need an audience of people who just love you more and more over time and want to read absolutely everything you put out. So how do you create that type of audience? Where do you find the people who you think are going to be that for you and how do you get in front of them and then develop a relationship over time. Because the problem and Tim talks about this all the time, the problem with chasing Amazon or whatever platform is going to be the next big one is they can change their rules at any time.

You’re never going to be able to truly keep up and if you are putting all of your eggs in the Amazon basket and they change something on you, you’re fucked. It’s just plain and simple.

[0:17:29.6] VF: And that has happened to a lot of people.

[0:17:31.6] SC: It has happened to a lot and it continues. You know every three or four years there is some big huge upheaval in the indie world because people are exclusive with Amazon and that’s all they have but if you have your own list of thousands of people that you own and you can reach them at any time, that insulates you from a lot of that buffeting that happens in the distribution channels that we have access to.

[0:17:58.1] VF: If I think about this as marketing or sales like resistance just walks right in the door and says, “I’m back” and I am just going blah, that does not sound interesting or appealing to me at all. I mean this is one of the reasons I had to actually get on a podcast with Tim Grahl to get my sorry self in this chair and get the work done, right? Now that doesn’t happen to me when I’m writing creatively. I mean it happens now and then I mean obviously.

But I can handle resistance on the creative side so much easier. When it comes to marketing, I welcome resistance walking in the door. Like, “Woo-hoo I have marketing block. I don’t have to market.”

[0:18:40.6] SC: But Valerie, look at your own, the marketing that you have come up with and the content that you’ve come up with. You have already done this, right? I am a subscriber to your newsletter and I can see the book reviews that you are doing, right? I can see how those books might be feeding your creative process and they are certainly feeding mine when I am able to pick them up and your writer’s life column is just another story, you’re storytelling there.

So you’ve already internalized this concept but you are still labelling marketing versus creative and they don’t have to be that separate.

[0:19:17.5] VF: Well if I think about it, instead of thinking about this as a marketing blah-blah really dry thing that I have to do, when it comes to the content and the outreach, I am an extrovert. So for me, going out and meeting people is a lot of fun. So I am looking at this not as a marketing activity but as a way to just meet new people who are interested in the things that I am interested in. I cannot as an author, I believe anyway, tell me what you think, I cannot abdicate my responsibility for promoting this book and for finding new readers.

[0:19:56.5] SC: Absolutely and that’s one of the things I have to tell my clients when they call and we start talking. It’s like, “Well I am just really busy and I just need someone to do it for me” Well I can’t do it for you. You know it is not going to work. You have to be your own cheerleader. You are the CEO of you, I think Steven Pressfield talks about that too, right? Like me incorporated, right? You are the head of that company and if you don’t want to invest the time,

none of your marketing is going to ring true, right? If I just create it all for you, it is going to feel so artificial. What I can do is help you channel the best voice and find the best audience etcetera and give you that sort lens because we get too close to our marketing just like we get too close to our own story and we need an editor or sometimes we get to close to our marketing and we can’t see what’s really going on but if my client isn’t willing to be down in the trenches and caring about that book and caring about making other people find it and care about it, it’s just not going to work.

[0:21:06.7] VF: What is your advice and recommendation for people who are really pressed for time and are trying to balance working full time with developing their career as an author with maybe raising a family or looking after aging parents or whatever else it is they have going on in their lives, what would you say to someone like that?

[0:21:27.0] SC: Stop watching television and get off of Facebook, right? Tim talks in Running Down a Dream, he talks about track your time. What are you actually doing every day? Where are those places where you’re just mindlessly doing something that is not making you any smarter or getting you any further towards your goal because that time is there. It really is and I am a mother of two children. I have my own business and I am also a fiction writer.

So I am doing my own fiction writing and marketing sort of on the side so I get it, but I think a lot of that is lying to ourselves and a lot of it is resistance because there is a lot that you can do and that is why having a book launch coach is really helpful because we can help you laser focus. So you are not just spinning around feeling overwhelmed and not knowing what is the next step to take. So we can help you be more efficient and use what time you have more efficiently.

And we can give you ideas that you have never thought of because you don’t live and breathe this like we do.

[0:22:31.4] VF: When you are dealing with clients who maybe are shier about the outreach and contacting someone to say, “Would you like to review my book” or “Can I come on your podcast?” What kind – how do you handle that? Do you do that or do they do that or does it depend on the situation you have with your client?

[0:22:51.2] SC: It could depend but just to be as helpful as possible to the introverts out there listening who are doing it on their own, again the connection system gives you a way to make it meaningful in connection. So I live in a house full of introverts. My husband is an introvert, both my kids are introverts and they thrive in one on one meaningful conversations, right? So they don’t want to be at a cocktail party making small talk but if they can have a deep meaningful conversation with someone then they love that and then they’ll go home and rest for a while.

So you can set it up that way for yourself as a more introverted writer, you might want to be more thoughtful about who you are targeting, right? So maybe you cast a narrower net but you find those areas where the person you want to talk to you know you are going to have a great worthwhile conversation. So you are willing to step outside your comfort zone to have that because it is going to be worth it. So I feel like the connection system is flexible enough to accommodate both introverts and extroverts.

[0:23:57.3] VF: So for writers who are starting their marketing activities, I mean we touched on this and we did talk about it a bit already is looking at the bigger picture of marketing and Shawn Coyne, when I was studying to be a certified editor, he taught me about the macro view and the micro view, which has really helped me in a lot of areas because I am detail person so I go right to the micro immediately and Tim is a macro thinker.

So we work together at Story Grid and I think that is one of the reasons we work so well together is because he is real big picture thinking and I am a detail person. So for me, I had to learn about to switch back and forth between macro and micro and I’ve had to do that with my marketing as well and I think the best place to start is this macro view, which is kind of what the connection system is as oppose to the micro view of the ins and outs of how Amazon works, would you agree?

[0:25:00.3] SC: Yes, definitely. You have to be able to switch back and forth but what I tell my coachees especially in group coaching as when you read an article online about what you’re supposed to be doing for marketing, you’re going to ask yourself, “How does this fit into your connection system?” Does this make sense? And also the great thing about Tim developing this is that he actually used data. He tested things and made sure that they worked instead of just throwing spaghetti at the wall.

So if you see, if you are in that detailed list of things you should be doing, you need to know how they tie back to the macro, how does this serve your underlying strategy and if you can’t answer that question, you’re probably wasting your time.

[0:25:49.7] VF: Sue, this has been fantastic, thank you so much for joining me.

[0:25:52.8] SC: Oh it was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

[0:25:55.8] VF: So if anyone listening wants to find out more about you, where can they find you online?

[0:26:00.1] SC: They should go to pagesandplatforms.com and they should sign up for my mailing list. Yes, and the magnet is a free 45 minute phone call and it is not a sales call. I will brain dump on you for 45 minutes.

[0:26:16.3] VF: Awesome, thanks so much.

[0:26:17.7] SC: All right Valerie, thanks.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:26:19.5] VF: That wraps it up for Season one of the Book Launch Show Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us and for following along as Tim coached me through the connection system, redesigning my website and generally untangling the mess that I had created with my haphazard approach to book marketing. We’ll be back soon with Season Two, when I start putting Tim’s advice to practical use to grow my mailing list and generate sales.

Don’t forget to visit booklaunch.com to get more of Tim’s marketing insight. He’s got dozens and dozens of articles there to keep you busy until we return. If you want to learn more about working with one of his certified Book Launch Coaches, you can find all that information at booklaunch.com/coaching and if you want to find out more about me and what I do, you can visit my website, valeriefrancis.ca. 

[END]

On today’s episode, we are joined by Jarie Bolander, a cohost of The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast and PR and marketing expert. Jarie helps writers use storytelling principles to become entrepreneurs. So often authors shy away from the business side of writing either because they do not know how to get started or because they find self-promotion embarrassing. It does not have to be! If you believe in your product and are proud of it, you should share it with others. Rather than viewing marketing as a means of bragging, you should see it as a platform for providing people with information in order to help them to decide whether or not to engage with what you have written. Putting yourself out there is not easy, but people cannot read what you have written if they do not know it exists. As a writer, you already possess many of the skills to create what Jarie calls a PR narrative, all you have to do is learn some of the tricks and tools to use these skills in a way that makes you a better entrepreneur. To learn how to get started, join us today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Similarities and differences between authors and entrepreneurs.
• What marketing really entails. 
• Why you need a paradigm shift when moving from being a writer to an entrepreneur.
• What makes marketing so difficult for people.
• Promoting is about providing people with product information.
• What a PR narrative is.
• In an age of overload, simplifying your story is the best way to grab people’s attention.
• You must interrogate your motives behind wanting to be a writer.
• Practical steps you can take to construct your PR narrative.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Jarie — https://twitter.com/enduranceleader

JSY PR & Marketing — https://jsypr.com/

Entrepreneur Ethos — https://www.amazon.com/ENTREPRENEUR-ETHOS-Inclusive-Resilient-Entrepreneur/dp/1634925505

Writing Your PR Narrative — http://jsypr.com/articles/writing-your-pr-narrative/

Five Steps to Craft Your Creative Narrative — https://diymfa.com/writing/5onfri-creative-narrative

Writing Your Business Narrative — https://www.thedailymba.com/2009/11/29/writing-your-business-narrative/

[0:00:00.3] VF: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Valerie Francis and this week, in our second bonus episode of the season, I’m bringing you a conversation I had with Jarie Bolander. Jarie and I along with three other Story Grid editors host The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast. In his day job, he uses story telling principles to help entrepreneurs build their businesses. Now, since authors are entrepreneurs. I thought it would be helpful to get his advice about how we can use the storytelling skills we already have to grow our businesses.

But before we get into that interview, a reminder that Tim has loads of information about book marketing over on his website, booklaunch.com. If you want to learn more about working with one of his certified book launch coaches, you can find all that information at booklaunch.com/coaching. And, if you want to find out more about me and what I do, you can visit my website, valeriefrancis.ca. Okay, now, let’s jump into the episode and get started.

[INTRO]

[0:01:10.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:18.9] VF: Jarie, welcome to the show.

[0:01:20.7] JB: Well, thank you Valerie for having me, I’m glad to be here.

[0:01:24.4] VF: This is going to be kind of fun, it’s just the two of us now, we don’t have the other three.

[0:01:28.1] JB: Yeah, I know, it’s pretty cool. Nah, I know it will be really fun. I will say hello to Lesley and Kim.

[0:01:34.5] VF: Exactly. Shout out. What I wanted to talk about today is the author as a business person because the other four of us on the podcast are – well, we’re all certified editors, but the other four of us are working with writers as clients. Your clients are business people, you’ve got a totally different spin on the Story Grid and you’re using it in a very different way.

You know, you and I chat about this with the others all the time. I thought, since this podcast is about the business side of being a writer and the marketing of the books and all that really fun stuff. That it might be –

[0:02:14.8] JB: The stuff that every single author just dreads in their bones doing, that stuff.

[0:02:21.0] VF: That stuff, that exact stuff. I thought it might be kind of fun if you and I chatted a little bit about what it’s like to be a business person as an author.

[0:02:30.3] JB: Yeah.

[0:02:30.3] VF: Yeah.

[0:02:31.7] JB: That’s actually really great. I was actually on Joanna Penn’s podcast talking a little bit about this as well and she put it as the author is entrepreneur and I really like that construct because the parallels between being an entrepreneur and an author are striking. Both an entrepreneur and an author create something from nothing, right?

Then they try to get people to read their stuff or buy their product. The difference between the entrepreneur and the author is the entrepreneur knows that they have to market and do sales and try to growth hack their way to success because for an entrepreneur, success is sales, selling company, being unicorn, being the next insert Facebook, Twitter, blah, blah, blah.

I think authors don’t quite get that, I know when we first met a couple of years ago and in fact the five of us when we always talk about this. I know the transition for the four of you over the last couple of years has been pretty striking, at least in my mind. I mean, I see you guys go from like, “business yucky,” to like really trying to foster that side because half the battle is writing the book, the other half of the battle is getting people to read it.

I wish there was a way that you could just write it and then people would buy it because I think authors have a lot of stuff to contribute to the world. But in today’s world, as of right now, until someone builds something that allows authors to just write, you also have to market and be an entrepreneur.

So yeah, I think it’s something that a lot of authors do need to think about and you know, I use the Story Grid framework and methodology for a lot of entrepreneurs and startups and nonprofits in my PR and marketing business. For me, it’s a super power and I would love to see more authors sort of feel more comfortable on the business side because unless you’re just going to write your book so that your buddies and your mom and your dad and your grandmother are going to read it.

You got to figure out how to get other people to read it and that’s business, marketing, PR and sales-y stuff.

[0:04:44.1] VF: Right, when I first started, I would hear the terms, authorpreneur and writerpreneur being tossed around and they were all very cute and that good stuff. But you're right, what we’re talking about here are people who have a goal of actually earning an income, either part time or full time through their writing.

Now, for people who are hobbyists and really don’t have that as a goal, that’s cool too. I think anyone who wants to write a book should write a book. Just because my goal is to earn a full time living through my creative work doesn’t mean other people have that same goal.

But the longer I’m in this business and the more writers I meet, the more I am sort of hanging around with and associating with the meeting writers who have a goal that’s similar to mine.

[0:05:27.5] JB: Yeah.

[0:05:29.5] VF: It’s a really big mental shift between having a passion to write a novel or multiple novels and want to be a novelist. Suddenly realizing, well then that means you’re a business owner. I mean, on this podcast, all the time, the whole reason I got on this podcast, Jarie, you know this, I’ve talked to you about this before is that I had such a dislike of marketing and sales because it was so dry and dull in my opinion at the time. That I had to actually get myself on a podcast with Tim Grahl to get my rear end and gear and get moving.

[0:06:05.4] JB: Get motivated, yeah, exactly. Nothing focuses the mind like deadlines and people holding you accountable.

[0:06:11.3] VF: Public accountability. I mean, Tim’s being very patient with me, bless him.

[0:06:17.3] JB: This is hard stuff, this isn’t easy.

[0:06:19.8] VF: Well, you know, at the end of the day, it is time consuming, running the business and try to figure out sales and marketing and I found it enough of a shift, but I come from a family of business owners. Both sets of grandparents, my parents own their own business and my sister owned her own business.

It wasn’t – it was a shock for me, but I come from a family of entrepreneurs. For someone who doesn’t, it’s an even bigger shift. So, I just wanted to – I wondered if you could talk to me a little bit about what that means, the mental shift that’s required from being a creative and, “I just want to write books to okay, now I’m a business owner, what do I even do there?” That’s a huge shift.

When you’re working with your clients, I’m sure you must deal with that.

[0:07:08.7] JB: Yeah, we do. I mean, startups and nonprofits have another problem, it’s something that authors – good authors and actually most people that write any kind of thing know how to do and that’s tell a great story.

And every client I’ve ever worked with doesn’t matter how big or small, always has a problem telling great stories to build their brand. What’s really great about like an author or someone who just loves to write is – chances are, they’re really good at telling good stories. That’s half the battle when it comes to marketing and sales and building a brand. Because a lot of times what people don’t understand, especially in the business world is that you can have the best technology, you can have the best product but if no one knows about it, no one cares, right?

For me, the company that tells the best story wins, even if you have a mediocre product. You even see this with books, you know? The big name, people that yeah, okay, it’s kind of like not the best literary thing or you know, you can just name the bestsellers that it’s kind of like, they’re not checking, they’re not like dialing it in, but it’s a formula, right? For them.

Well, the same thing goes with business and a lot of times, the other thing that people don’t really quite understand is that sometimes the messaging that you think resonates because it resonates with you, may not resonate with the people that will actually buy your book or your product.

And you have to experiment and this stuff is kind of like creation where it’s more art than science, although you can apply some science to it. The real shift at least in my mind and I have an engineering background so I didn’t come into this like, “wow, business is cool.” I mean, I built computer chips, right? I was not the kind of person; I didn’t even know what marketing and salespeople did.

I thought they were absolute waste of energy and time, it’s like, “we build stuff here, what the hell do you guys do?” Then I realized, I got an MBA, you know, went to the dark side a little bit. I realized, I said, “wow, this is a really tough job.” I mean, just imagine, you have to sell something to someone. You have to convince someone to part with their money and if you think that that’s easy, just try to go sell 10 of anything on a street corner or try to get someone to donate to a cause.

And you will quickly realize that it’s hard, it’s probably harder than creation, right? Let’s just say, you're an author and you write a great book and chances are, there’s a lot of great books out there. No one reads it and then you’re like, “well, why does no one read it?” Well, because there’s a lot of great books out there. No one knows about you.

So, the shift is, at least in my mind, you have to go from, “woe is me, woe is me, I write great stuff, why can’t people just appreciate it?” To, “oh, I need to let people know how great I am,” and I know for some people, that’s really tough to self-promote, I hate it, to me, the hardest thing in the world. I struggle every day having to say, “look at me, look at me.” But, if you put out good stuff, why wouldn’t you want people to read it?

You know, you can do it in a way that’s not braggy, right? I think that’s what a lot of authors don’t understand and even businesses, especially nonprofits. Because a lot of nonprofits, it’s so similar, right? Nonprofits, we have this great cause. People just give to the cause. And I’m like, “okay, people don’t know about your cause.” And like “well, you know, we’re uncomfortable bragging about.” Well, “you’re not bragging, you’ve given people the opportunity to make a decision.”

And you want to give them as much information about making a decision. You want them obviously to give to your nonprofit, buy your product or buy your book. Well, how do they do that? You’re informing them and educating them about what you have to offer. There’s nothing wrong with that, there’s nothing slimy about that.

I mean, if you do it in the right way, right? Why wouldn’t you want that? And so, the mindset is not that you’re bragging, it is you’re giving people the opportunity to make a choice and since you’ve built something you are proud of, why wouldn’t you tell them how proud you are?

Tell them, “hey, if you’re interested in young adult, sci-fi, fiction/dystopian, why not give me a look?” Seems reasonable to me but that’s a hard thing to do. I could say it, but it’s hard to do, right?

[0:11:53.2] VF: I think it’s something that’s really interesting about this business and the business of being a professional writer. When people ask me what I do, well, it depends who it is. But my default is – or the way I think of it in myself is, I’m a storyteller. Because I don’t want to narrow myself down to just novels, you know?

As I go through my career, I would love to branch out into screenplays and all the kind of stuff. In fact, I started with screenplays, years ago. I’d like to keep going with that at some point. I think of myself as a storyteller. So, I can create a world, I can create characters, I can do all that kind of stuff.

The fascinating thing for me is that as a marketer or when I’m marketing my products or services. One of the things I have to do is actually create a story about who I am, what I stand for, what my business is about. Now, the difference is, when I write a novel, it’s fiction, right? It’s not a true thing. When I’m creating a story about me and who I am as a professional, that is nonfiction, that’s a fact as to what I truly believe and truly stand for.

I think you know; you don’t have to listen to me too long to understand what I’m about because I keep saying the same thing over and over again.

[0:13:10.6] JB: That’s good, repetition is good. That’s another thing that people get all bent about. I have said the same thing over and over again, it’s like yeah, keep on saying the same thing over and over again until you find something that works.

[0:13:21.4] VF: The people listening to this podcast are writers. So, as someone who uses storytelling to help business people, what advice would you have for the people listening and how they would create a story for themselves for their own business?

[0:13:39.4] JB: Yeah, that’s actually what I work on a lot and it’s the first thing when I engage with the client, I do. I basically take them through a narrative workshop, which I call their PR narrative or their public relations narrative and it’s basically the tip of the spear of all of their communications. And the reason why this is important is, you need to have a very solid, simple to understand narrative about what you do.

That is the thing that most companies, nonprofits, authors, professional – I mean, everyone tends to get this wrong. The reason why they get it wrong is because they just dialed down into the minutia or the technology or the 25 cent words on what they do that no one really cares about because cognitively, right, there’s so much noise out there and so much content that you need to simplify, simplify, simplify and this narrative that I give people to go do is really the first conversation to hook people in so that they will go read more.

The Story Grid methodology, right? We’ve got the beginning hook, the middle build and the ending payoff. Well, the narrative is the beginning hook. Is it worth my time as someone that may want to do business with you or may want to read your book, for me to continue on?

Now, you may think, “well, I want to suck them all in and you know, it’s complicated and you know they got to get to know me, you know? It’s so – there’s so much here.” Yeah, I get it, right? But no one cares, right? They want to get, is this worth my time and you’ve got 10 to 20 seconds to figure out. Is this worth my time, right?

Once you’ve hooked them in, then you of course, you expand and this is who you are, whatever. But that first 10 seconds, 20 seconds, that narrative, that one to two sentences about who you are and what you do. If you don’t get that right, the rest of it just doesn’t matter because you’re going to wonder and a lot of people wonder this.

“Wow, how come no one comes to my website? How come no one gives me their email? How come no one cares what I do?” It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just they don’t know. And imagine there’s a hundred people in a room and you can do this exercise like the next time you’re at a cocktail party. Let’s just say there’s a hundred people in the room and you don’t know anyone.

Then you just like start talking to people, who are the people that you’re going to want to talk to more? For me, it’s the ones that interact and of course, there’s maybe pleasantries, but it’s the one that tells me the best story that hooks me in.

As authors, we know this. I mean, read the first page of a novel, right? First page of a novel, if that’s not good or the intro’s not good. Most of us put it down.

[0:16:40.6] VF: This is something that is a big shock to a lot of people and I don’t know if I’ve said it on this podcast before, but I know I’ve said it. It’s something I struggle with as a writer. I have people that I know personally, reaching out to me to say well, “I want to be a writer, what advice do you have?”

And I struggle finding the balance between giving them a sense of what this job really is because it is a lot of sitting by yourself in a room. It requires huge amounts of self-discipline. Most people don’t know that unless you happen to know someone who is a professional author, your idea of what this job is, is very romantic and now that is very cool. It is a cool job, don’t get me wrong.

[0:17:27.4] JB: It’s a cool job but most people don’t have that discipline or they –

[0:17:31.3] VF: They believe they will never have the discipline. Discipline is like any other skill you develop it overtime.

[0:17:35.4] JB: Yeah, you can work exactly, right.

[0:17:37.5] VF: So I struggle between finding the balance between letting me know what it is really like and taking off their rose colored glasses and discouraging them because I really don’t want to discourage anyone who ever wants to wrote a novel. But after I’d finish my first book, I came across Steven Pressfield’s book, Nobody wants to read your Shit, which is one of the best books ever written and I think it is hilariously funny only because I’d already figured out that stuff.

If I hadn’t already figured it out I might have been heartbroken, I don’t know. But the bottom line there is that nobody cares about your book as much as you do, which is why in my opinion it doesn’t matter what your publishing model is whether you are an independent author or a hybrid author or you want to publish traditionally and have another company actually publish your book for you. The marketing is your job because in a traditional publishing company, you’re one of a slate of authors.

I mean once you get to someone, you get to the level of Neil Gaiman or J.K Rowling, that is a totally different ball of wax, but we are not there yet. Unless Neil Gaiman is listening in which case, hello Neil.

[0:18:46.8] JB: Hey Neil, how’s it going? I love your stuff by the way. Yeah, exactly. Great adaptation of your work, you know?

[0:18:54.8] VF: That’s right. So, for me, that was something I had to get my head around and I had to accept that I am the one who is going to be selling these books. and for me, it kept me from writing for a really long time because I didn’t want to be a sales person. None of that sounded like anything I ever wanted to do and as I have said to Tim, what I try to do is shift how I think about it because now, I’ve got a paradigm about it that I am trying to work on.

And just think about it as relationship building because I love meeting people, right? And I love talking to people and connecting.

[0:19:31.5] JB: That is a great way to think about it.

[0:19:33.8] VF: That I can do and if they like what I am about then they can pick up the book and give it a try and if it is not for them, no problem. Like you said, there is a difference between being that person who is constantly spamming their friends on Facebook with, “buy my book, buy my book, buy my book.” And someone who is a professional writer who is developing a career over the long term.

And I found for me, just in with that and talking with people who want to come into this business and want to be a full-time author, one of the things they really want and one of the reasons they are writing a book, even if they are not aware of it first is for  third party validation.

[0:20:14.8] JB: Oh yeah.

[0:20:16.0] VF: And I think it is really important for anyone who wants to write to understand why it is they are writing. Whatever their goal is, is cool. It is absolutely fine. You just have to know what it is because it is really going to change your approach to what you are doing. Like you know, for me I want to be a full-time writer. Well that means that I’ve got to suck it up buttercup and learn how to market my books, right? Or I could go back to the day job I felt a few years ago and I am not doing that. I would rather not, thank you.

[0:20:46.2] JB: Yeah, that reason why I am an entrepreneur is because I am unhirable and unmanageable. So, if you are that kind of person then you definitely want to be in some sort of freelance entrepreneur. Yeah, I mean when I go through this narrative exercise with clients, the first thing, the first question I ask is actually three and it is modelled off of the Story Grid because I just find that’s such a useful framework.

Why does your company or non-profit exist? Why are we here, what is the internal reason why? Not the fame and fortune and money that we want to. Okay, that’s great. But there is a reason deep in your soul that you need to start this company, this non-profit or you are writing this book? And it is for a third-party validation then you should probably just stop because like entrepreneurship, books and entrepreneurs are the same.

So just as an example, everyone knows about unicorns if you are an entrepreneur world. What is a unicorn? Unicorn company is worth a billion dollars. So, I mean we are recording this a couple of months ago, you know Uber, Lyft went public. They’re valued at some ridiculous number, right? So, the probability of a startup becoming a unicorn is roughly 1%. So just let that sink in. So, you see all of these great companies that are all going public.

For all the ones that have made a billion dollars, there is 99 that are either walking wounded, which means they’re struggling along and maybe they are doing okay, but most of them are gone and they are gone after three to four years, right? That is the game, every single venture capitalist and investor knows that the game is a game of numbers. It’s just odds because it is a lot of luck to get to be a unicorn. Yeah you got to be smart, you got to have the right team and you got to have the right talent and the technology and the timing and all of that.

But generally, you talk to anyone who’s been successful in the entrepreneur game, you get them in the room and you hand them a couple of drinks or whatever they’re into and you say, “so what’s the secret?” And they’re going to be like, “well, I worked hard and you know honestly, there’s a lot of luck.” Because that is the way the world works. If you were to look at the author world, the chances of you getting the bestseller and blowing up and being the next J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman or whatever is 1%, probably.

Probably more like one to 2% maybe even less. So, if you wrote 100 books, one of them is going to be wildly successful. So, if you are going to be an author, do this for a living your goal, I mean you get it in 50 because it is probability right? But do you have 100 books in you?

[0:23:35.9] VF: Okay that’s depressing.

[0:23:39.5] JB: I don’t think it’s depressing.

[0:23:40.9] VF: I reject that statement.

[0:23:42.6] JB: Okay, but I put it that way for a reason and the reason I put it that way is that if you are just starting out as an entrepreneur or as an author, you’re probably pretty bad at it would be my guess I mean I was.

[0:23:56.7] VF: But it’s a skill. Isn’t it a skill like any other skill?

[0:23:58.5] JB: A 100% yeah, it is 100%.

[0:24:00.1] VF: I am on my third book now and I still like my first book. I am still proud of my first book because by god, I got to the end of it. And on a macro level it works because I fluke into the Hero’s journey and I have never heard about the Hero’s Journey in my life. I just fluked into it because I had consumed so many stories. Don’t look under the hood too closely but on a macro level it worked. So even though I have learned so much since then, I am still really proud of that.

Because that was my baseline, you know that was my starting point and I did pretty good but writing a novel is a skill just like marketing is a skill, just like playing the piano is a skill. You are going to start out as a beginner and you are going to have to learn the fundamentals, right? And then practice them, practice the skills and get better, yeah?

[0:24:52.4] JB: Right, yeah there is no doubt. But this is the thing about the why and this is about why am I doing this? So, let’s just say, you know 1% bestseller and you can do the math. Just go look at the math. It’s pretty easy math and let us say your goal as an author is to be the bestseller, okay? And it is just like an entrepreneur. You know the odds are low. Okay so fundamentally, then why are you doing this? It is clearly not to be a bestseller because that is almost lunacy.

Just like being a millionaire and entrepreneur. If you are going to be good in the entrepreneur game to be a millionaire, you’re crazy. Just go work as an engineer at Google, you’d be a millionaire quicker. So, there is another reason why and this is the fundamental thing that people really need to understand. There has to be an internal why as to why you are doing this that transcends all the perks and what will happen like as an example, you. You are proud of your first book, which you should be. For whatever reason, you got lucky. People get lucky but the more harder you work, the luckier you get.

[0:25:55.2] VF: It wasn’t luck. It was I’d read zillion books, right?

[0:25:57.6] JB: There’s that too. So you did the work but again, it is not to say that it’s impossible because it is not impossible. It is to say, what’s your mindset on the journey to get there? Because if you are like, “oh I do a book, it doesn’t do well. I’m frustrated, I am done.” Okay, well you are not a professional. I mean I have written six books. My first book was a disaster, right? It’s like, “ugh,” you know? The latest book I did, The Entrepreneur Ethos, you know thankfully I found Story Grid.

Thankfully I applied it mostly. So, a big idea non-fiction book aboutThe Entrepreneur Ethos about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I mean I am very proud of that. I don’t care if it is never a bestseller or whatever because I am like, “this is who I am.” Like I wrote what I am and what I believe and that is powerful. So yeah, I don’t like to be a Debbie-downer but the more you do it the better you get at it. Same with marketing, same with writing. But again, what’s the path you’re on?

[0:27:03.1] VF: Okay let me stop you there. So, for people who are listening, who are like me and really are beginning here with the marketing because I know a lot more now than I did a few months ago when Tim and I started and hopefully people have been able to learn along with me.

[0:27:18.3] JB: Oh yeah, it’s been a great podcast by the way. I really enjoyed it.

[0:27:22.3] VF: Thank you.

[0:27:23.1] JB: I listen to it often.

[0:27:25.2] VF: I don’t know if people are being inspired by it or just waiting to watch me face-plant, I don’t care either way.

[0:27:30.5] JB: Oh no, no, no I don’t think it’s that. I think the thing is, you are tackling a very scary subject for your audience and people are probably freaked out beyond freaked out.

[0:27:45.7] VF: I am not alone! Oh, hooray!

[0:27:48.1] JB: No, I can almost guarantee it because this is the thing about a mindset change, right? So, everyone says, “oh I want to do a new habit. I want to do this. I want to do that. It only takes 30 days.” Or whatever I mean whatever or however long it takes you to build the habit as an author to market yourself if you don’t have the mindset to begin with. It’s like, “oh I am going to run a marathon,” oh my gosh like similar analogy.

[0:28:17.5] VF: So, what can people do? What are some practical steps? We talked about constructing a story for themselves in their own company, how do they do that? I mean look, it is hard enough to figure out how to write a novel. Now we have to take those skills and massage them a bit to our company. You said that the way we do that is really to create a beginning hook and if you guys listening, if you don’t know what we mean, when you are done listening to this episode pop over to the Story Grid.

There is two podcasts, Jarie and I as I said off the top are both certified Story Grid editors. So, this is the language that we use and I can’t use any other language anymore. But it is the thing, the beginning hook in your story is roughly the first 25% of your novel and it is the thing that is designed to draw your reader into the story so that they can’t put the book down. They have to keep reading to the end. So Jarie, if I understand you correctly that when we are creating a story for our own company what we’re doing is actually writing that beginning hook.

And creating a story that will attract the readers in the first place and get them to read our books is that right?

[0:29:28.2] JB: Yeah or sign up for your website, email or follow you on Twitter, Instagram or whatever yeah. So, the first thing if you are new to this is write your narrative and I will send Valarie a link. I have done a bunch of articles on how to write your narrative and part of my PR business also wrote another book called Seven PR Secrets All Founders should know and it is a good start if you are a founder of your own author business as well.

So, the thing is that there is and again, I modelled it after the story grid. So, in the narrative there’s the beginning, the middle and the end or the beginning hook, the middle build and then ending payoff of the narrative itself and so the three components of this narrative and they are pretty easy. The first one is why you exist? And that is an internal why or as an author I exist to do. The second one is what makes you unique and you really got to think about this because there is a lot of noise out there.

And then the third thing, which I know probably sounds a little weird is what pain do you solve? And as an author, you think, “well what pain am I solving?” Well, what you want to do if you want someone to buy your book is at the end of whatever you write or whatever you are doing, you want them to somehow be satisfied that the time they spent on your book, on your whatever, was worth it.

So that is the pain you solve. Now, it could be you may need to play around with this, but for each one of those three, write two sentences and pick a single word that describes it because those words are really important. So, when someone asks you what do you do when you have your narrative in your mind and you just bang it off real quick, you’re like, “oh wow, hey I want to hear more about this.” So, I will give you an example.

So I run a PR and marketing firm and I have run this for a couple of years now but it is called JSY PR & Marketing and JSY PR & Marketing, its sole purpose is to help non-profit startups and professional athletes tell better stories so that they can make an impact in the world and we use the power of media to make that happen. So, if you’d meet me at a cocktail party and you say, “what do I do?” And I tell you that if you’re interested in that then you’ll ask me, “well, how does that work?”

[0:31:45.3] VF: Right and this is the same exercise that Tim had me do when I had to come up with a sentence, you know love stories for busy women, right?

[0:31:52.9] JB: Yeah, exactly. So, you actually already have a lot of this narrative. In fact, that is actually what would be your elevator pitch. So when someone meets you in an elevator and this is a classic entrepreneur thing, when someone says, “hey, what do you do?” And you’re like, “I write stories for busy women.” They’re like, “oh well tell me more.” And then now, you have an opening. So, all of this, all of this narrative and thinking about it and having this little snippets they are all to get you to have someone say, “oh tell me more.”

Not inundate them, not expand the horizons of human existence and coalesce the vapors of it in a tangible form. It is like give them the opening so that they give you permission, like Dracula, right? In order for Dracula to come in, you got to give them permission.

[0:32:47.0] VF: That’s right.

[0:32:47.4] JB: Right? So, we all know this, internally right? We don’t like to talk to are the ones that just ramble and like, “oh my god da-da-da.” When someone gives you permission to tell your story, you got them.

[0:33:03.0] VF: It is all about developing the relationship with your readers. So, when I think about it that way, then doing things like podcasts are not nearly as scary as they would have been if I thought, “oh well now I have to be a product.” No, I just want to meet other people who love stories too. When my friends are looking for a book to read, they call me and say, “well, can you recommend a book? I am looking for this.” Or that thing, which is part of the reason I started my book club, right?

So, the first of every month I recommend a novel by, for, and about women. Some of that gives me lots of breathing space to pick different genres because I like to read across genre. This is part of getting to know me and it is an opportunity for me to get to know other people and that I think is the essence of marketing.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:33:49.0] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

Today on the show, as part of a few bonus episodes, Valerie is interviewing Mark Dawson who is an award-nominated USA Today bestselling author with more than 20 books published and over 2 million books downloaded in multiple countries and languages. He’s also a teacher, showing other writers how to self-publish and he and his team offer up-to-date courses on leveraging digital advertising. Today the two of them talk about Amazon and Facebook ads, an avenue that Valerie is looking to explore to get to that golden 10,000 number. Mark explains in detail how the two platforms differ in terms of what they offer and the difficulty or ease with which authors can advertise on them. There are great benefits to both, and he provides in-depth insight for which kind of ads to go for, how to target the right people and how to make sure that you don’t overspend. Be sure to check in for this special episode!

Key Points from This Episode:

• Why it’s best to start with Amazon and the many benefits of Amazon ads.
• Clever ideas for getting readers to give you their email address or sign up to your mailing list. 
• A bit more on the courses Mark and his team offer and having to constantly update content.
• When advertising on Amazon makes more sense than advertising on Facebook.
• The advantage of advertising on Facebook in terms of specific targeting.
• Getting into the Advantage dashboard with Amazon ads in Canada.
• The account requirements for advertising in countries other than the US.
• Starting off with sponsored keyword ads rather than lock screen ads.
• A guideline on how much to spend on this type of advertising.
• The importance of knowing which authors’ books yours are like.
• The ABCs of advertising on Facebook.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Mark Dawson — https://markjdawson.com/

Barnes & Noble — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Kobo — https://www.kobo.com/

Amazon Advantage — https://advantage.amazon.com/

Lee Child — https://www.leechild.com/

David Baldacci — https://www.davidbaldacci.com/

James Patterson — https://www.jamespatterson.com/

Grace and Frankie  — https://www.netflix.com/za/title/80017537

Self Publishing Formula — https://selfpublishingformula.com/

Shayne Silvers — http://www.shaynesilvers.com/

[0:00:01.0] VF: Hi there and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Valerie Francis. For the next few weeks, Tim and I have some bonus episodes for you. We finished our first season together. As we prepare for season 2, we have a few interviews we thought might be of interest to you. If you listened to last week’s show, you’ll know that I have a plan for getting 10,000 people to read my book. That plan involves running a few ads. Well, who better to ask for advice about ads, than Mark Dawson.

Mark is an award-nominated USA Today bestselling author with more than 20 books published and over 2 million books downloaded in multiple countries and languages. He’s also a teacher, showing other writers how to self-publish. He has a particular expertise with Amazon and Facebook ads, which is why I decided to give him a call.

If I’m going down the advertising route, I am going to need a whole lot of help. I’m starting at square one with this, and Mark had some excellent and eye-opening advice for me. If ads are something you’re considering, you need to listen to this episode.

Okay, without further ado, here’s my interview with Mark Dawson.

[INTRO]

[0:01:20.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:28.4] VF: Well Mark Dawson, welcome to the Book Launch Show Podcast. How are you tonight?

[0:01:32.9] MD: I’m very good. Thank you. How are you?

[0:01:34.4] VF: I’m good. Thank you. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me, because I have a ton of questions.

[0:01:42.3] MD: Good. No pressure.

[0:01:42.3] VF: No pressure. Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from; I started a few years ago in Indie Author. You know us well. I instantly became overwhelmed with everything that I have to learn and that we all have to learn when we come into this business. What I did was put all my marketing tactics and strategies and practices on hold and I focused on learning how to write. That’s what led me to working with Shawn Coyne and Tim Grahl and all those guys.

Now that I have at least a foundation on how to write, I’m starting to jump back over into the marketing side of things. I’m really coming – I’m starting from square one as an author, as a Story Grid editor I have a pretty good platform, but as an author, I’m at the beginning with the small mailing list and all that good stuff.

I’m looking now at I have a children’s novel that’s done and I’m putting that aside, because that’s a whole different cradle of fish. That was my learning how to write novel. I have now a love story, it’s women fiction and it’s a novel in 12 parts. This is the one that I am getting ready to market. I’m looking at doing some ads. This is where I need your help big time.

[0:03:02.0] MD: All right. Okay. I’ve done a few ads in my time.

[0:03:05.4] VF: You have. You have. I figured, go to the person who knows, right?

[0:03:11.1] MD: Yeah.

[0:03:12.0] VF: First of all, I’m in Canada, so I don’t know if that is going to make any difference with availability of different things, but I just wanted to let you know in case as we go through that makes a difference to anything.

[0:03:25.0] MD: Small difference. Yeah, everything is possible with Amazon tweaks that you’d need to do if you want to advertise on Amazon, especially in Canada.

[0:03:32.6] VF: Okay. Yeah, Kobo is easier for me being in Canada. I’m thinking, since I’m starting with a pretty small list, my goal is to get my book in front of 10,000 pairs of eyeballs. Then once I do that, they can then figure out if my book is for them. If so, great. If not, that’s also fine.

I’m thinking of trying Kindle Unlimited for a short period of time, but question number one is if I were to do Amazon ads, does that target people in Kindle Unlimited? Does it have anything to do with it? Are they two separate issues?

[0:04:13.9] MD: Yeah. Absolutely. Let’s back up a little bit. Your novel is in 12 parts. It’s one book or 12 books?

[0:04:20.5] VF: It’s one book in 12 parts. Everyone has to start at part one and go through sequentially.

[0:04:25.5] MD: Okay. This is just a standard format in terms of how it’s all put together. Okay, got that. To answer the question first of all about KU. When I talk to authors in your position, thinking about whether to start in KU or to go wide, my usual advice is to start with Amazon, because it makes sense to learn one platform and Amazon will be the biggest platform, regardless of where you live, it will be the platform that you’re almost selling, going to sell the most books on.

You’re only tying yourself in for three months, in terms of the exclusivity period. If you get to the end of the third month and you decide it’s not working for you, then it’s easy enough to untick the box and then go wide and learn the other platforms. I agree with you, I think if that’s what you’re completing, then that would be in-line with what I would advise.

Then with regards to advertising on Amazon and can you advertise to KU people, well absolutely. One of the benefits of Amazon ads is that they are shown on Amazon. They’re actually on the website as people are browsing for the new books. Some of them will appear on Kindle devices as lockscreen ads. As people pick up their tablets or their Kindle files, or their [inaudible 0:05:36.9], whatever it is they’re picking up, the ad can appear there.

That’s going to capture people who read in KU and it’s also going to capture people who make Oracle, a la carte purchases and pick those – actually purchase the book in a traditional way. The benefits of those Amazon ads is that you’re effectively getting a double band for your buck. If you’re not in KU, you’ll be aiming to just sell books. The ad will appear and you want people to click on the ad and then go to actually buy the book.

If you’re in KU as well, you can add a bonus. They could go and buy if they’re not in KU. If they are in KU, they could make that as part of the subscription, download it and then read it and then you’re getting per page read as well.

[0:06:20.3] VF: Now, I know one of the things in KU is that well, you’re exclusive, but that means I also can’t offer say, part one as a free download from my site as an e-book. I can do it as an audio book, or I could read it on a video and have people download that, but not as a straight download e-book, right?

[0:06:41.2] MD: Correct

[0:06:42.5] VF: Okay. My next question and I don’t even know if you an answer this, but you know better than I do anyway. My next question is once I start to run ads and I’m targeting people on Amazon and within KU, I would ideally like to get them onto my mailing list somehow. Am I still permitted to have, say at the end of part one a link to get like a DVD extra, for a lack of a better term, by signing up to my mailing list?

[0:07:15.4] MD: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s standard practice there. One of the first things you should be looking to do now is to put a link at the end of part one. I think at the end of part one. Unless, this is a very unusually structured book that might feel a little in the way of the story. You’d certainly want to put it at the end of the book, so when people finish.

The reason for that is if someone gets to the end of the book, so they’ve read say 400 pages, or a 100,000 words, at that point they should be fairly well disposed towards you. They’ve read the book. They’ve enjoyed it, because they’ve got to the end. It’s a really good time to ask and to do something.

There’s a few things we can do. We can ask them to buy the next book in a series if you’ve got more than one more book, or we can ask them to join our mailing list. That would usually be what I’d recommend newer authors is to start building that mailing list up.

There are a number of things that you can offer as we sometimes call reader magnets, or incentives, or even bribes to get people to give you their e-mail address, and I’ve been doing this a while now. The days, I don’t even know when I started that it would’ve worked just to have a link at the back saying, “Join my mailing list and I’ll tell you what my new book is about.”

It didn’t work very well, but it certainly doesn’t work now, but people are concerned about giving their e-mail addresses out to people getting spammed, all that kind of stuff. You need to sugar the pill in order to get them to give you that e-mail address. As you say, DVD actually is a pretty great looking. You can do all kinds of things. You could offer [inaudible 0:08:41.2] tends to work quite well with something spinning off that book they’ve just read.

One thing I’ve done that’s worked really well over the course of the last 4, 5 years is to have – it’s like a PDF. One of my character, John Milton, imagine him going to a psychologist and this is a psychiatrist report to Milton superior. I’m setting out the results of this consultation that they had. He’s redacted. It looks like it might be an official document. I mean, Milton is an MI6, ex-MI6 agent. It looks like it could be something that would be real. Because I know at that point people have enjoyed reading Milton’s first story and they’re intrigued about how he got to the position that he’s in, that’s something that they are very interested in getting.

In terms of production, it took me a couple hours to write it, so it’s maybe two or three pages of A4. Then maybe another hour to make it look authentic and turned it into a PDF and then it was ready to go. That’s probably, I don’t know the exact numbers, but it would’ve brought in probably 10,000 people to my main enlisting in the time that I’ve been running that.

[0:09:42.9] VF: Wow. Is that in KU, or was that –

[0:09:46.3] MD: Yeah. I mean, it’s – I’ve been in an out of KU over the years. It doesn’t make any difference. You can offer an incentive whether you’re in KU, or whether you’re not in KU.

[0:09:55.2] VF: Well, this gives me hope. I like to hear this.

[0:10:00.0] MD: What you can do is offer something. You can’t distribute something that is exclusive to Amazon. The way that the phrase and the terms is defined, certainly captures if you’re trying to sell it on Barnes & Noble or Kobo. It’s something that is in KU. It also catches, if you’re trying to give something away on your website, or as a reader magnet, that’s when the item is in KU. What it doesn’t cover is anything original. You might need to spend a bit of time putting something together, but once you’ve done that, you can use that as you see fit.

[0:10:30.6] VF: I can still have the print versions available on Kobo, or not in chapters actually, not in Kobo.

[0:10:36.4] MD: Yeah. Print it’s a separate IP, so that determines the conditions in KU, cover the digital version of the book.

[0:10:43.4] VF: Right, okay. Let’s talk about ads. I know and you’ve got a number of amazing courses. I’m a student in I think all of them. As a student, I just want to first of all, say thank you because I know that you and your team work really hard to keep those courses updated and it’s very much appreciated from someone like me, because I bought them a while ago, but I’m only now starting to use them. I have confidence that they’re up-to-date, so thank you to you and everyone else there, because it’s a piece of work boy to keep all that updated.

[0:11:14.8] MD: I know. Actually this week, I’ve spent all of yesterday updating the Amazon ads module, because it’s changed three times significantly in the last couple years. I’m very uncomfortable in putting stuff out there that’s outdated. It’s a pain in the ass, to be honest to have to be [inaudible 0:11:32.3]. I promised that when we offered the courses and that’s something that I tend to honor as long as I can.

[0:11:40.2] VF: This is why I like the Story Grid stuff, because it’s evergreen. Stories haven’t changed in thousands of years. Makes it a little easier.

[0:11:49.0] MD: It does.

[0:11:50.7] VF: If we’re going to look now at Amazon ads, I’m shying away from Facebook a little bit. One, because well, it scares me. I feel like when I go to Facebook, I have to convince people that they want to read a book. Whereas, when I go to Amazon, they’re already there to get a book or well, they could be looking for something else. Chances are they’re there to get a book on the pages that I’m going to pop-up on.

[0:12:17.2] MD: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the main difference between the two ads. There are pros and cons for both. With Amazon, you can use a responsive keyword ad. You can ensure that your book pops up as an ad for people who are searching for specific terms. If you know that your – if you can dial down your book into its constituent parts, or figure out exactly what it is people would be searching for to get to that book, you can make sure that your ads appear when they make those searches.

At that point, they want to buy – they’re on Amazon to buy. Amazon is I think is the third biggest search engine in the world in terms of volume, and it’s [inaudible 0:12:56.6] that people can buy something with one click after seeing the ad. That’s the benefit of Amazon ads; one of the benefits.

Facebook ads, you’re right. You have to prescribe people that actually they’re on Facebook to catch up with their friends, or to see what their colleagues are doing. What they’re probably not interested in doing, at that point, or at least I think they are is for shopping for just something. It is possible to get them with a compelling-enough ad. You can get them to go from a social media site, like Facebook, onto a retail site like Amazon and make that purchase.

One of the big differences between Facebook and Amazon is that Facebook’s audience is just gigantic and the targeting that it allows is really, really granular and very specific. It’s several stages ahead of – where Amazon is at the moment. Pros and cons. Amazon is a good place to start definitely.

[0:13:49.5] VF: If I were to use Facebook ads, do you find them better for getting on a mailing list, or better for making sales or is there a difference?

[0:13:59.0] MD: I find them pretty good for both, to be honest. I ran a lot of Facebook ads all the time, either for the self-publishing formula, so they either can be the nonfiction business that we have. We spend, I don’t know, it will be in the hundreds to thousands a year to continue to refresh our mailing list on that score. They’re very, very good for that.

Also, if you got running ads all the time to get people into the mailing list, they do work very well for that. Equally, one of the things I’m doing, because we’re launching the [inaudible 0:14:27.3] calls again next week. One of the things that I’ve done over the last couple of months is launch a new series, or launch translations of one of my series in the German market. I’ve invested in three books to be translated.

The interesting thing here for me as a case study is that in Germany, no one knows who I am. I don’t have any – I have no readers, no fans, my name isn’t known, my characters aren’t known. I’m effectively in a position of a new author trying to find new readers. I’m running Facebook and Amazon ads. They’re both working, but I think at the moment, the Facebook ads are more effective than the Amazon ads, which is quite interesting. That’s selling books directly.

[0:15:07.4] VF: Wow. Okay, let’s look at Amazon ads. If I ever ventured on the Facebook ads route, I’ll call you back.

[0:15:13.9] MD: Sure.

[0:15:15.3] VF: With Amazon ads, I know there are three different types of ads; product display, keyword search and sponsored brand ads. I know there are two different types of dashboards. I don’t know if I can get into the advanced dashboard in Canada. Do you know?

[0:15:32.1] MD: Yes, you can, but it’s difficult. One of the things we’ve done this week is we’re having, we’re recording the course, basically the two access points to the Amazon advertising ecosystem are the easy way and the hard way. The easy way is to go through KDP dashboards. You just go to your bookshelf, you click the book that you want to advertise and you’ll be taken through to the more basic version of the platform.

By doing that, you can use sponsored keyword as a lockscreen ad. There’s ads that appear on Kindles when people pick them up. The dashboard isn’t quite as sophisticated. It’s much, much better than it used to be. 100% of them was 18 months ago, but still not quite the same as the advantage dashboard. Now the advantage dashboard is the more difficult way to get in. I’ve got one that will actually also add; on the basic version, you can only advertise into the US market, which is a real pain.

[0:16:21.7] VF: Oh, okay.

[0:16:23.5] MD: You wouldn’t be asked to advertise into Canada with the basic version. There is a way to advertise in Amazon and other markets, and that’s to get an advantage account. Typically, advantage accounts use I think four people who are selling other things on Amazon, and not really intended to be used for books. I think, Amazon especially, I don’t want to put words into their mouth, but I think their position is that authors can use the platform if they get on, but they won’t be supportive.

You can’t go and ask for help and things like that. They would much rather people go on through the KDP access point. I suspect in the next, certainly in this year, I suspect that those geographical restrictions would be lifted and the platforms will become less distinct. They’ll be much more similar.

In the meantime, if you want to advertise in Canada, you will need an advantage account. For me for example, I’ve got one in the – I’ve got five or six different Amazon advertising accounts; one for the UK, one for Germany, one for I think I’ve got Canada. I want to do France this year, so I’ll need one in France, I’ll need one in Spain. It’s a real pain, but the ads are definitely worth doing. It’s worth the aggravation of getting those set up.

[0:17:29.7] VF: Okay. If I want to target Canada, the US and UK and say Australia, I need four different accounts.

[0:17:36.5] MD: Yes. You’d have a KDP account anyway, in order to get the books into those markets. That would allow you to advertise into the US. Then on top of that, you would need three – you need separate accounts for those, any additional jurisdictions you want to advertise in.

[0:17:50.9] VF: Three advantage accounts, or –

[0:17:52.9] MD: Yeah. Yeah, so you’d have a KDP account and then three advantage accounts.

[0:17:57.8] VF: Oh, I’m glad you told me that.

[0:17:59.8] MD: Also, what I [inaudible 0:18:00.6] down here, it’s a little difficult to get those accounts. We nailed how to do it in the UK and then the rules changed. What we have in the course six months ago doesn’t work anymore, which is one of the reasons why I’ve been revising what the course says, because it is a bit of a moving feast. The rules changed, what seemed to be a loophole before has been closed.

There are other ways in. I know, if you know someone who works for Amazon in the advertising department, then you can probably get that source reasonably easily. It’s not terribly easy for normal authors to get in. Not impossible, but it’s tricky.

One of the things we do in the course is we have a private community where we will – if we find some another way in, that’s the best way that we can keep the information cold and I’d always record another video and post it into the internet private group.

[0:18:52.8] VF: For now, I’m essentially starting with the basic Amazon ads options that are already in my KDP account.

[0:19:02.3] MD: Correct, yeah. That would be focusing on the US, for Amazon anyway. You might want to, you know that call this and you might want to make in the earlier. You might want to make that book, so you can start to advertise to Canada, because Facebook, all of that, you can advertise to anyone in the world on Facebook.

[0:19:18.5] VF: Okay. Okay, that is interesting. Thank you for telling me that, because that’s going to – I need to think about that and figure out how I’m going to work with it. Within Amazon then, for now I have two options, right? The product display ads and the keyword search ads.

[0:19:36.1] MD: No. The keyword search and the product display changed about six months ago. They’re now called lockscreen ads. You can use product display ads through the KDP version. You can use them through advantage. It does get a bit complicated. The simple way in you can use product – it’s what we call sponsored keyword ads. Betting on keywords that people are using to search. Those lockscreen ads that appear on Kindles when people open them.

In advantage, you can use product display ads, sponsored keyword ads and sponsored brands ads. Those are the ones there, we used to call headline search as it appear at the top of search results.

[0:20:13.5] VF: Right, the banner. What I call banner ads.

[0:20:15.9] MD: Yes, that’s right.

[0:20:17.4] VF: If you were starting now, which one would you focus on?

[0:20:23.7] MD: Definitely sponsored keyword ads. Lockscreen ads are tough to make work effectively for lots of different reasons. The sponsored keyword ads, they tend to work quite well. A really simple one just to get started is to basically let Amazon choose the keywords. You do an automatically targeted ad, advertise in one book and Amazon will come up with what might look like a collection of weird keywords.

Some of them will be right, so that your name would certainly one they pick. Entirely, the book will be one as well. It will then start to put in some weird suggestions that you might think and I certainly for when I started doing this, they wouldn’t work, but then when you start looking at the results that come back, some of the weird ones will actually sell books straight enough.

Just when I do, now you can get these ads up in well, 5 or 6 minutes. You need to write a little bit of copy. After that, that’s it. Then the books, the ads will start to serve. You should think, just go start sending books that way. Probably not in huge numbers, because those ads are quite difficult to scale, but you should start to get some positive results.

[0:21:28.8] VF: Okay. I know whenever I start these, I’ll start small and just test some ads to see if they’re working.

[0:21:36.7] MD: Yup.

[0:21:37.4] VF: What can I expect to spend on a weekly or monthly time period for this to actually work, right? To me, I look at this like going to the casino. When I go to the casino, I bring only as much money as I can afford to lose. I look at this as the same way. If I think to myself, “Okay, I have $500 here I can play with and I can lose that $500.” Is that going to get me anywhere, or am I really looking at a $1,000, or $5,000 in order to get this thing to work?

[0:22:09.2] MD: It’s really hard to say. It would depend – I can’t really give you an answer on that, because it depends on tons of different things, from your genre, to your cover, to your blurb, to how good you are at writing copy, lots of different things will play into that. The one thing I would say is going back to when I started doing this on Facebook, I was one of the first authors to start using Facebook as far as I know. This would be like in 2014.

I initially, because I was feeding my way into learning how to do this. I would spend $5 and then maybe I make – maybe for a couple of weeks, I’d lose that $5 every time, because the ads were wrong for listing reasons. Eventually, I worked out what was wrong and I fixed it and maybe I start to make $10. Then I’d take the $10 then I’d spend $10 the next day and I’ll make $20. Then I’d put that back and make $40.

Before you know it, I was spending a $1,000 a day and making $3,000 or $4,000. That’s the way to do it. It’s to learn, only spend what you can afford to lose and learn – don’t go nuts. Don’t be too aggressive too fast. Always look to spot your mistakes, learn from the mistakes. Don’t worry about mistakes, you can make some. You much will welcome them, but just make sure you don’t make them twice. Then slowly start to scale up. Then hopefully before you know, you’re spending a fair bit each day, but making much more.

[0:23:27.5] VF: It’s the ROI I really have to look at.

[0:23:29.7] MD: Yeah. That’s the main thing. I mean, there’s tons of metrics that Amazon and Facebook will [inaudible 0:23:34.9] with. It’s very easy to get lost in how much you’re paying per click and what your click-through rate is and all that kind of stuff. It’s interesting and you should be aware of what it means. The most important metric of all is if you spent a dollar, are you making more than a dollar back? If you are, the ad is successful. If you’re not, then you can make an argument that if you’re making a small loss, you’re getting exposure, which in the early days of advertising, that was what advertising was. It was just getting your name out there. These days, we’re lucky enough that we can actually get that exposure for free effectively and make a profit. That should be your aim.

[0:24:15.4] VF: Okay. Well, while I have you here, I’m going to ask you about Facebook ads now, since you’ve given me a piece of information, I didn’t know before. Okay, so if I’m going to look at Amazon ads for essentially the US, but Facebook will give me access wider. Start me at square one. How am I going to use these ads to find my 10,000 people?

[0:24:41.3] MD: Okay. You need to think carefully about – a really easy way to start with Facebook ads, I mean, we will skip over list building for now. We’ll concentrate on selling books. You need to think about who your – what we’d say, your comp authors are, so who you like. For me as an example, my books are quite like the Jack Reacher books, so you got Lee Child would be an author. I quite like, David Baldacci, James Patterson, Mark Kessler, guys like that. Those are the kinds of writers that I like, so stands to reason, they’re [inaudible 0:25:11.9], their readers would also like my books.

One of the things you can do with Facebook and this is the entry-level targeting for Facebook ads is to use what we call interest targeting. Facebook knows lots and lots of information about everyone on their platform. Obviously, that’s being quite controversial over the last 18 months or so. One of the things that enables us to do as advertisers is to send our ads very, very specifically targeted ads to people who we can be confident, we’ll receive that message in a favorable way.

I might on Facebook, I’ll do some demographic research. I know how old my readers are, they tend to be over 40.  They’re about 75-25 male to female. What I might do is run an ad to people who are 40 and up. Maybe men only, or I tend to get quite the results with women on Facebook ads as well. I might say 40 and up, men and women who like Lee Child books.

I know from all of that that I am targeting my ads very, very granularly to people who are likely to enjoy my books. I’m not wasting impressions on people who like romances, or comedy, or sci-fi, fantasy. I know I’m targeting not just thriller readers, but readers of specific series versus my own.

Once you know that, of course you can then start to craft the copy specifically. I might say in my copy, so what you see in the ad, this is a bit cliché and that is parting my folks, I’ve taught many people how to do this. If you look on Facebook feed, you’ll see – you’re almost certain to see authors saying, if you like author X, you will like author Y. Now I may not have made that out, but I think I did. It was very, very effective in the early days. It’s not quite as effective now, because everyone is doing it.

You need to be a little bit more creative. If you know who your audience is , you can right-copy the reflects what you think that they would be interested in reading, which is much, much more difficult to do on the other advertising platforms.

[0:27:07.2] VF: Yeah. One of the exercises Tim had me do was create author, or reader personas. I have four basic personas that I work with now. Those would be the people that I would be targeting on Facebook, right, in my ads?

[0:27:21.9] MD: Yes. One of the great things about advertising on Facebook, especially is it gives you lots of information. Over time, so maybe in six months’ time, you can then go in and see exactly who has been responding to your ad. You might find that these personas that you’ve built, can be improved a bit. It might be that you think your demographic is a certain thing, but it actually turns out it’s completely different. If that’s the case, then that can even influence you writing. If you’re finding that your demographic is younger than you think it is, then maybe that would affect what you write. There’s loads of interesting feedback that you can get just from running the ads.

[0:27:58.5] VF: Okay. On Facebook ads, I’m going to focus on interest categories, groups

[0:28:06.4] MD: To start with, yeah. That’s entry-level targeting. What you can do beyond that is make it full if you haven’t. That’s a pretty easy and quite effective way to get into it.

[0:28:17.8] VF: Once I get a handle on that, then I can go to the next level and do other things with Facebook ads.

[0:28:25.1] MD: Yes, absolutely. That is really that surface level stuff. Facebook is continually bringing in new features and some of the things that they can do with targeting now are really impressive. Yeah, definitely is a lot of depth there, but for someone who’s just starting out, my best advice would be to just learn the easy stuff first. Then once you’ve mastered that, graduate to the next level and learn that, then rinse and repeat.

[0:28:49.4] VF: Okay. One of the things in my personas, Tim said, what other types of books do they read and what other types of stories do they like? One of the things I said was that they would be the type of people who would like Grace and Frankie. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that show on Netflix, but it’s not a book. It’s a Netflix series. Would you advice putting that in as a keyword, or as a looking for people who’d be interested in that, since it’s not a book, but is the same type of story?

[0:29:20.9] MD: It’s worth trying. The hierarchy of interest targeting would be authors would be top, so you know that people who like Lee Child are readers. They’re readers who like an author a bit like you. That’s going to be what I call fairly warm leads.

Dropping down below that, you’ve got things like TV and film. I do find they work. They probably don’t work quite as well, because within in that subset, not everyone will read. You may find that they’d rather watch it on Netflix. They might not be interested in reading a book. Many of them will, but probably not as many as the people that actually like the authors.

[0:29:58.7] VF: Okay. All right, I’ll start with authors and go from there. All right, my brain is really full. I know this, I’ve only just scratched the surface with this, but my brain is now full. I think I have – it’s like a sponge. I need to absorb this much information and then I can come back and get the next morsel of information and wrap my head around that.

[0:30:19.6] MD: Yeah. One of the things we see in the group quite a lot in our Facebook groups is the people who do their best are typically the ones who just are methodical and they follow the course almost sequentially, so going from one thing to – It was put together in a way that was designed to be consumed like that.

The ones who struggle and we see people going, “I’m overwhelmed. I can’t do this. It’s too much to learn,” are the ones who are trying to learn it all at once. It’s huge. There’s like 30 hours plus of content in just in the ads course. It isn’t as going to be – I guess some people, clever to me who could probably suck it all up and then learn with it, but most people, me included, learn best when we take small bit-size chunks, get that mastered, start to put that into practice and then look to find what we need to learn next. That’s how I put the course together.

[0:31:14.2] VF: Right. Tim has said the same thing to me, and consistency over time, just like you said. Being very methodical about it and a little bit every week, right?

[0:31:23.5] MD: Yeah, absolutely. The most important, you’ve got to keep writing. That should be your – if you have a certain amount of hours every week that you can devote to develop and this is a career, the most important thing is to keep writing fresh words, because that would be – you can advertise. If you have a new stuff, you can advertise different ways and it’s another product to sell.

By the time token, the days are long gone now where you could just put something up on trams and cross your fingers and hope that the magic algorithm would see and send you to riches and all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t really happen anymore, if it ever happened. You do have to advertise now. That’s a minimum. The good news is the fact that you’re talking to me now puts you, I would say probably in the – at all authors you’d be in the top 1% and 2%, because most people either don’t know what’s possible with independent publishing. The great majority don’t understand that yet. Of those, only a small subset are prepared, either know that they’ve got to advertise, or are prepared to learn. You’re ahead of most people just by the fact that we’re having this conversation.

[0:32:25.1] VF: Oh, thank you for the ego boost. I appreciate that. The pep talk.

[0:32:30.6] MD: There you go

[0:32:31.4] VF: You mentioned that you’re going to be opening your courses soon. Where can people get more information about that?

[0:32:37.2] MD: Well, what day is it today? We open a week today actually, so June the 6^th I think it is. We only open the courses. There’s two courses, a basic course for people who are just starting out. That covers all the technical things about getting books uploaded and all that stuff. Readers, finding reader lists and all that. The advertising course is the other one and that’s open as I say, in a week’s time.

The best place to find out about that is selfpublishingformula.com. We’ve also got the free Facebook community with I think about 20,000 authors in it now. We do a weekly podcast on Fridays, which is good. We’ve gotten lots of actually good – we’re opening the course on next week. We’ve got three episodes next week; one on Facebook ads with an author called Shane Silvis. He is doing – he’s crushing it and over in fantasy right now.

We’ve got Bookmabads with David Gogran. He’s well-known in the community and I’m doing Amazon ads, and also talking in a bit more depth about how I’ve launched those translations in Germany and how I’ve been using Amazon as an effective ads to start making progress over there.

[0:33:40.1] VF: How long will registration be open?

[0:33:41.8] MD: It’s two weeks, maximum of two weeks. Although, we have a notional upper limit in terms of how many people I’m comfortable with onboarding at once. We haven’t hit that yet, but I think it’s fair to say, it will be over for a couple of weeks. If people are interested, they just hop over there sooner rather than later.

[0:33:58.1] VF: Awesome. Well Mark, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

[0:34:02.6] MD: It’s a pleasure. Good luck.

[0:34:05.0] VF: Thank you. Talk to you soon.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:34:07.0] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes’ show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com.

Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

Today on the Book Launch Show we’re wrapping up Season 1 where, on every episode thus far, Tim has been advising Valerie and walking her through the very first steps in launching and selling her book. In light of the closing season and the upcoming break, Valerie discusses what she plans to do about reaching that magic number of 10,000 readers and what she is setting in place to pique the interest of women’s book clubs whom she hopes will review and give some exposure to her book. She also talks about experimenting with Kindle Unlimited and Tim guides her on how to run marketing tests that are effective and that deliver unequivocal results. They also get into the various opportunities with BookTubers, Instagrammers and the many other reviewers who might give her book their stamp of approval. Don’t miss out on the season finale!

Key Points From This Episode:

• How Valerie is approaching the task of getting to the 10,000 readers marker.
• Why she wants to create print versions of her book to send to women’s book clubs.
• The strategy she is using to make her book digitally accessible.
• Replacing the downloadable version on her website with an audio of her reading the book. 
• Reaching out to BookTubers, Instagrammers and others to review Part 1 of her book.
• Boosting your profile though Amazon ads in Kindle Unlimited and then testing the results.
• Keeping your readers hooked throughout and giving them a further enticement at the end.
• The importance of running experiments that are actually testable.
• Being careful not to run two tests simultaneously and thereby clouding the results.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Girly Book Club — https://thegirlybookclub.com/

Badass Women’s Book Club — https://www.badasswomensbookclub.com/

IngramSpark — https://www.ingramspark.com/

Barnes & Noble — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

BookTube — https://www.theodysseyonline.com/what-is-booktube

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Tim Grahl. If you’ve been listening over the last several months, you know that Valerie and I have made a lot of progress on this show. We’ve gone over just about every aspect of her platform, looking at her website, looking at outreach, looking how she’s branding herself, how she’s promoting herself and all kinds of stuff that hearing from you guys has been really helpful. What we’re going to do now is take a couple month break.

We’ve got this episode, that I think is really important because it’s kind of setting her up for the next few months and then we’re going to wrap up this season and take a break for a couple of months throughout the summer. I’ve got a lot of travel, we’ve got a lot of things going on.

I think you’ll like this episode, we dive into setting her up for the next few months so she can really start making progress and again, if you missed any of the last few episodes or last several months’ worth of episodes, I highly recommend you go back and listen to them all.

This was Valerie’s idea, she pitched me on this idea and I like the idea but I’ve been blown away with how it’s come together and gotten a lot of feedback from you listening that has been really helpful for you. Thanks for listening, thanks for continuing to listen. If you’re not subscribed, make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that when we start up again in a couple of months, you will automatically get notified.

Thanks for listening and let’s jump into this episode and get started.

[INTRO]

[0:01:38.0] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[EPISODE]

[0:01:43.5] VF: Hello, Tim.

[0:01:44.7] TG: Hello, Valerie, good to talk to you.

[0:01:48.4] VF: How are you today?

[0:01:49.7] TG: I’m hanging in there. I’m about to start a bunch of travel so I’m trying to get enough done that I can peacefully leave town so we’ll see how it goes.

[0:01:59.7] VF: Yes, this will be sort of our last one for a little while of the end of this season and we’ll pick it up again in the fall which means I have a whole bunch of questions for you today.

[0:02:10.7] TG: All right, I’m ready.

[0:02:11.9] VF: All right. This past week, I’ve had a little bit of a spaz out, I will admit, I was just getting overwhelmed and I was also getting lost in the weeds which you know is a bit of a specialty of mine. I had to pull right back and look at the macro view. My overall goal was to what I’m trying to do with my books with the marketing strategy and all that good stuff. I focus in on something we talked about recently which is that magic number of 10,000 people.

I’m trying to get 10,000 pairs of eyeballs on my book. I started from there and I thought, okay, I got to come up with ways to do this and we’ve been talking about this for weeks but I needed to pull back and gather all that information together so that I had a strategic plan. Here’s what I have, okay?

I’m focusing on getting 10,000 people to read Part 1 because it’s a novel in 12 parts and I really do like that format, I think it works really well for my readers but of course I can’t market all 12, that’s just insane. I’m just going to market the first part because if I can get people to read that, if the story is for them, they’ll keep reading and if it’s not, they won’t. In terms of the 10,000, I’m trying to get 10,000 of Part 1. Okay?

Just really narrowly focusing on that. To do that, I have a couple of ideas. I’ve been looking at podcasts and book clubs and all that kind of stuff. I mean, that’s what I’ve been working with, working on with you and those types of groups of people tend to like print books, great, no problem.  Because I already have a plan to create a print version of this book. I’m really fussy about my print versions because I want it to look –

I want it to be very visually pleasing. I’m going to create a print version of the book that I can send to Girly Book Club for example or Badass Women’s Book Club, something like that, I think it’s called. Just pulling a blank. They are welcome and open to new authors or authors they haven’t heard of before but they do require print books, that’s cool. I’ll work on that.

Print copies, I go through Spark, IngramSpark, that will hit my libraries and everything, but for digital. I’m thinking that I might, at least for the short term, go on Kindle unlimited, which is exclusive to Amazon, which means I need to – the reason why is because people who are avid readers are going to have a subscription. You know, that’s going to be financially beneficial for them to have subscriptions, that if I’m looking avid readers, they’re in there and I know there’s a lot of people who like love stories who are in there.

Even though my book is not a romance, I can’t call it a romance because it breaks the sub-genre conventions. That doesn’t mean that people who enjoy romance won’t also enjoy my book. You know what I mean?

[0:05:18.9] TG: Right, yeah.

[0:05:20.2] VF: I’m thinking for the short term. I mean, I have to try for 90 days at least. I’ll go in Kindle unlimited for the digital copies of the books. Now, that means, I have to take my digital offering, you know, download Part 1 from my website, I’ll have to take that down but I can replace it with an audio version so I can either video tape myself reading Book One or just have a straight audio of me reading Book One.

I can offer that on my site. I’m good at reading, I’ve been told.

[0:05:58.8] TG: That just sounded funny.

[0:06:00.4] VF: Well, I’m good at reading my own work.

[0:06:03.0] TG: Yeah.

[0:06:04.1] VF: Have you been to a literary festival?

[0:06:07.0] TG: I don’t think so, no.

[0:06:08.7] VF: Okay, well, when you go to literary festivals, a lot of the authors will get up to read from their work to the audience and it’s really painful to listen to because they’re writers.

[0:06:19.8] TG: Okay, I’ve seen those, yeah. You said, ‘I’m good at reading’ and I was like, well I hope so.

[0:06:28.8] VF: I’m good at reading my own book aloud, how’s that? Point taken. Okay, that’s my strategy. For the digital to go on Kindle Unlimited for three months and see how it goes, to replace the download from my website from the digital book because I can’t offer there if I go exclusive with Amazon, to an audio version or maybe a video of me reading it, to create a print version of my book for the podcast listener’s book clubs and so forth and the print version, I can still make available through chapters, Barnes & Noble libraries and so forth.

[0:07:08.6] TG: Okay.

[0:07:10.3] VF: So far, what do you think of that?

[0:07:11.9] TG: I really like the first part about focusing on getting 10,000 people to give the first part a try. I think it’s a really good, clear goal and something that you would be able to track so you would know when you hit the goal and yeah, it takes away kind of the muddiness of trying to figure out the 12 parts and whose read what and all that kind of thing.

I love the idea of doing the print books as well and I think you could think bigger on who you would send those to. You know, I have a buddy I’d talk about a lot. His name’s Mike Tomas and you know, he almost exclusively used Instagram to send prank copies to people, you know, large Instagrammer, people with large followings on Instagram, that were in his niche and that helps sell the book really well.

Your instinct on doing that for reviewers and all of that kind of stuff is really good. The one thing on Kindle Unlimited is, I think you should definitely run the experiment, you know, I’m always up for running experiments. I’m curious, are you hoping that merely having it in Kindle unlimited will, like more people will read it because they’ll find it because they’re looking for Kindle unlimited books or do you have a specific plan to go after people that are on Kindle unlimited so that they’ll get your book during this window?

[0:08:46.1] VF: That’s a good question. It would be lovely if merely putting the book in Kindle unlimited accomplish this goal. However, I’m not quite that naïve anymore. I do have a couple of ideas. First of all, just back up a little bit. In terms of who else to send my print books to. I am developing a list of people on Instagram who review books and also BookTubers who review books like mine. Because they’re kind of like book clubs by another name.

They have a lot of people, especially the BookTubers. They have a lot of people tuning in to listen to them and then they sort of comment in the comment sections below the video. I kind of lump all those people in to my book club idea

Yes, it’s taking a while to do this research but I am broadening it out to the book clubs, podcasts, online groups such as BookTubers, Instagrammers, other reviewers, all that kind of stuff.

[0:09:46.8] TG: Okay.

[0:09:47.0] VF: In terms of Part 1 of Masquerade. I mean, social media is good for what it’s good for which is one-on-one connections. It’s not good for sales. That said. I will be putting up posts here and there just to remind people that they can get it there and I tend to get a lot of engagement on Facebook for that. People liking and sharing.

I will do that kind of thing, that will be sort of an ancillary thing. The primary strategy I have for trying to boost a little bit of profile while I was in Kindle Unlimited is Amazon ads. Ads kind of scare me, I will admit that. Again, it’s another tool in the toolbox and I think if you know what the tool does well, then you can use it properly. For me personally, running ads is not something that I can sustain long term.

I think in terms of long term strategy, things that we’ve been talking about on the podcast are much more effective. Like my book club every month and my writer’s life email out every month and continuing to write the best book I can write and all of these types of slow, steady progressive things in my long term strategy.

But, for a quick hit of attention. I’m thinking of running some ads during that three-month period. Just to see what happens. What do you think about that?

[0:11:11.7] TG: I know, it just depends. I tend to shy away from ads because I feel like it’s one of those things that it feels like an urban legend where you always know somebody that knows somebody that does really well with them. You know what I mean? I rarely have come across anybody who specifically does really well with them.

My thing is just to do what I’m sure you’re going to do already which is test it very carefully, watch the results and do your absolute best to break even, and if you can’t, in the test relatively quickly. Because buying ads is a really great way to burn through a lot of money.

[0:12:02.3] VF: Yeah.

[0:12:04.7] TG: Because – ads are notoriously hard because on one training I did, I did a graded Facebook advertising for books pretty hard and somebody was like no, you can make it work and I’m like yeah, but when you dig into the people that are making it work, they’re spending hours and hours in the return on investment. It’s thin, you know?

I’m like, are you tweaking the 90% of effort that gets the 1% of results? Because a lot of times, when I did a great thing, well it works for me and I’m like, I’m not saying it doesn’t work, the same way I’m not saying you can’t get a nail on the board with a rock. I’m just saying there’s better tools like hammers and nail guns.

[0:12:48.6] VF: Right.

[0:12:49.1] TG: I just tend to worry about that kind of stuff. I would say, to try it and just watch it very closely and make sure that it’s – what I was going to say the reason why it is so hard for books is because the margins are so thin especially if you are talking about Kindle Unlimited and so because the margins are so thin, you have to convert. You either have to get extremely low click rates or extremely high conversion rates or both. So you just want to make sure that kind of stuff. So that is what makes me nervous about it is it just – if you are not watching it like if you set it up and it runs for five days.

And then you look at it, you could have lost a few hundred dollars in that time. I mean you can set all the caps and all that kind of stuff on it but it is just making sure you are doing everything carefully.

[0:13:40.8] VF: It feels a little to me like going to the casino, right? When I go to the casino I say, “Okay, how much can I afford to lose?” and that’s how much I take and once I lose that I am done for the night or if I happen to finish the night with 20 bucks left in my pocket I go, “Hey that is a $20 bonus. I made 20 bucks today” this is another reason why I don’t – for me personally, I don’t think that running ads is a permanent long term solution because it takes so much managing.

And I mean they do kind of scare me too but I don’t really know a lot about them so it might just be fear of the unknown, I don’t know, but if I focus in for this three-month period, I am curious to see what happens. I mean maybe I will just lose a bunch of money and nothing else will happen but my goal is to get eyeballs on the book not necessarily – like if I break even I’ll be happy, right? In terms of the money out and the money for that particular experiment.

But again, that’s just testing something in the short term. That is not something that is sustainable over the long term. You are going to make money if you are going to write.

[0:14:49.8] TG: No, in your book, in the first part of the book where are you driving people to get the second book, the second part?

[0:14:57.0] VF: Well, I can’t remember what’s in there right now. This is terrible, I mean I put in there myself. I am just pulling a blank. I mean the all 12 parts will be available on Kindle Unlimited. So if I am a Kindle Unlimited member, I’ll just get the second part as part of my subscription.

[0:15:12.1] TG: I see.

[0:15:12.9] VF: Right but what I want to do is at some point try to capture those people on my mailing list right? Because it is no good really in the long term for me to have 10,000 people look at my book in Kindle Unlimited and I don’t know who those people are and I haven’t given them any reason to come look for me or sign up to a mailing list. So this is something I forgot to mention earlier, what I need to do, possibly in part 12, because if they made it all the way to part 12 they really liked the book.

Is have some kind of DVD extra at the end of part 12 and I am not quite sure what it will be yet, it has to be something really good so that they will go and sign up to my website to get that thing and maybe it will be an extra story. Maybe I will write down a short story about one of the lesser characters. Maybe it will be video interviews because there are people like in real life who are dealing with issues that are similar to the types of things that come up in the book, right?

So that could be an interesting conversation, it could be an ask the author type of video series. I got a bunch of ideas but I haven’t really thought through any of them yet to figure out which is the best, what do you think about that?

[0:16:25.2] TG: I think that is good. The reason I was asking is I was trying to think if there is a way that you could test. What I want to know is if you are buying ads I want to be able to look at the end of this 90 day experiment and say it worked or it didn’t work. And so my question would be one, how many downloads and then how many downloads did the advertising drive and then maybe it is just how many did your downloads of book two go up as well, you know what I mean?

[0:17:01.9] VF: Yes, and this is a big question mark for me because I have never done Kindle Unlimited. So I have to figure this out and maybe someone listening already knows the answer to this question, maybe you know the answer to this question, Tim. I think in Kindle Unlimited, you get what you’re told is normalized page reads. I don’t know if it breaks it down for you to say that 50 people read book one, 10 people read book two. I think they just say so many pages have been read.

[0:17:29.4] TG: But can’t you look at pages read per book?

[0:17:32.6] VF: I have no idea but that is a good –

[0:17:34.9] TG: I am pulling up an account right now that I can look at. I am sure people are yelling at the podcast right now that actually know what they’re talking about.

[0:17:43.1] VF: I don’t have to know what I am talking about on this podcast.

[0:17:47.0] TG: I don’t know that is a good question. I wonder if somebody would know that and could email us about it but anyway, the biggest question I am asking is – the biggest thing is the only way to run a true experiment is to be able to know if it worked or not and so I just want to make sure that and the other thing you’ve got to be careful is running two experiments at the same time that will skew each other’s results. So if you are running Kindle Unlimited for an experiment.

And you are running ads for an experiment, you are not going to, like and I don’t run enough Amazon ads to know but will you be able to see like, “Okay, here is how much the ads drove and then here is everything that happened independent of the ads.”

[0:18:36.3] VF: No, I don’t think so.

[0:18:39.0] TG: So that is also what makes me nervous is when people run lots of different – more than one experiment at a time that they are not going to be able to differentiate between because what I don’t want you to do is get to the end of the experiment and be like, “Oh wait, did this happen because it was on Kindle Unlimited or did this happen because it was I was running ads?”

[0:19:03.9] VF: Well so maybe the best thing to do is to stagger it, right?

[0:19:07.0] TG: Yeah.

[0:19:07.6] VF: Because this is sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t but the only way to find out is to come up with the best plan you can and then test it, right? So maybe the way to go about it is to put the book in Kindle Unlimited and just see what happens on its own.

[0:19:22.8] TG: Yeah, why don’t you do – so first of all I just looked it up. You can look at normalized page reads per book. So you can do that in your KDP dashboard. Now here is what I would do, put it in Unlimited and don’t run ads for 30 days. Then run ads for a period of time, two weeks, 30 days, whatever but then stop again for at least two to three weeks of the 90-day period so that you can see what kind of effect no ads, ads and then after ads because you also have –

You know, if it starts bumping up it might raise up an algorithm too. So then at least you’ll be able to get several different looks at what is happening and then make sure too that you are keeping track of all outreach and publicity that lands so that you’ll be able to say, “Okay I was on this podcast and I was on release on this day and I saw page reads go up” or “I didn’t see page reads go up.”

[0:20:32.4] VF: Right, there is a couple of interviews I’ve done that haven’t posted yet. So I am waiting to hear from those, okay continue. I think I cut you off.

[0:20:41.2] TG: Yeah, no it is just important to think about this ahead of time because I have done it before where I have tried too many new things at one time and at the end, my data was so muddled I didn’t know which of the things had which effect and that’s really frustrating because then you’re like, “Well I don’t know which thing I should keep doing and which thing I shouldn’t keep doing” do you understand what I am saying?

[0:21:07.0] VF: Yeah, that makes sense. Oh yeah, absolutely.

[0:21:08.2] TG: Yeah.

[0:21:08.4] VF: Well and this goes back to something that you’ve – I mean you have said this so many times I have lost count that it is consistent effort overtime. It is not about coming out of the gate with one big hurrah and then nothing, right?

[0:21:23.5] TG: Yeah, I am interested to see like, will having your book on Kindle Unlimited increase the amount of people that read it and maybe even your income because they are short so they are likely to read the whole thing. That is a really good experiment to try and if at the end of the 90 days you’ve had twice as many people reading the book because you are on Kindle Unlimited that’s great. But if you’ve run an ad campaign in the middle of it and your numbers go up.

At the end of the 90 days are you going to know, “Well was I getting more readers because of the ad campaign or was I getting more readers because I was on Kindle Unlimited?” and if you can’t answer that question, both experiments were kind of a waste of time.

[0:22:05.6] VF: Well that makes sense. It is also a lot less stressful to test one thing at a time.

[0:22:10.7] TG: Yeah, so I feel like sometimes people that hear me talk missed the point because I feel like I often come across as like this curmudgeon that doesn’t like to try new things you know? And I am always up for trying new things but I have to be able to try them in a way that I could see that if I get the results that I am going after. I don’t want to try random things and having no way to see if they are working or not. So both experiments are good experiments. You just got to do it in a way where you’ll be able to suss out if they work or not.

[0:22:45.9] VF: So step one is just to put it on Kindle Unlimited with an enticement at the end of the book 12 to sign up to my mailing list.

[0:22:52.7] TG: Yeah, I think that would be good.

[0:22:54.3] VF: That’s it, that’s all just see what happens.

[0:22:56.9] TG: Yeah and do that for 30 days and if you see no change, now let’s try an ad campaign, you know what I mean? But even if it spikes and it maintains that for 30 days, run an ad campaign, you just need to have data for them separate because maybe you even do like Kindle Unlimited for 30 days. Kindle Unlimited with ads for 30 days. Kindle Unlimited without ads for 30 days and then no Kindle Unlimited with ads for 30 days.

And then you are going to have four different kind of chunks of information that you could look at and started saying, “Well if I did this and that worked really well but when I was on Kindle Unlimited that didn’t seem to have any kind of impact. So there is no point in having it on Kindle Unlimited.” You know you can start sussing out what to do next.

[0:23:47.9] VF: So I need to keep track of how many page reads per book or sales per book because even if it is on Kindle Unlimited it can still be purchased from Amazon. So I need to keep track of how many page reads or sales per book every day? Do I go to check every day?

[0:24:06.5] TG: Yeah, I mean it will keep track of it for you. So I don’t think you need to check it every day, you know what I mean? KDP automatically breaks it up by day. So I don’t think you need to physically go in and track it every day, but yeah.

[0:24:22.9] VF: Okay, so I can just go in every couple of days or once a week or I’ll be obsessively checking it at the beginning, let’s just be honest here.

[0:24:31.0] TG: Sure, no I understand.

[0:24:32.1] VF: Okay and then we’ll just see what happens.

[0:24:34.7] TG: Yeah.

[0:24:35.3] VF: Everybody tell your friends.

[0:24:37.8] TG: That’s right.

[0:24:40.4] VF: Okay, any other words of wisdom for me before you wander away for two, three months?

[0:24:47.2] TG: No, I think you’re good. I think having a really clear goal is one of the best things you can have because then it informs everything you’re doing, “Is this going to get me closer to 10,000 people giving my book a try and if so I am going to try it.” I think that’s good.

[0:25:04.2] VF: Okay, so this wraps up season one where I was getting all of my ducks in a row and season two will be all the really fun stuff. So I’ll see you back here in September.

[0:25:14.2] TG: Sounds good.

[0:25:15.0] VF: All right, thank you so much, Tim.

[0:25:16.4] TG: Thanks, Valerie.

[0:25:17.3] VF: Bye.

[0:25:18.0] TG: Bye.

[END OF DISCUSSION]

[0:25:19.0] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com.

Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

Today on the Book Launch Show we talk more about finding and connecting with your tribe, those true fans who love your work and who will continue to tell others about it. First off you want to grab the attention of those people who read a lot, not the folks who get halfway through a book on vacation once a year. We discuss the importance of practicing a number of one-liners that tell your audience exactly what your books are about and the market you serve, and then memorizing the one that translates best to advertising copy and all other communications. Knowing where you ideal readers hang out and who they typically follow on social media is another great way to identify and make contact with tribe leaders who are going to help you get the word out. Join us for this episode to find out more!

Key Points From This Episode:

• More about Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast and his ideas around true fans.
• Focusing on attracting a solid number of committed fans rather than trying to be famous.
• First reaching out to and targeting people who are avid readers.
• Continuing to pitch your book in different ways to people on your email list.
• Establishing and communicating the benefits for someone to read your book.
• Memorizing that concise sentence that tells your audience exactly who your books are for.
• Taking every opportunity to reach out to your audience and promote your product.
• Paying careful attention to where your personas hang out and who they follow.
• Using social media to connect with influential tribe leaders and getting them on board.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/

Tribes on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Tribes-We-Need-You-Lead/dp/1491514736

Purple Cow on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-Transform-Business-Remarkable/dp/014101640X

The Dip on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Dip-Little-Book-Teaches-Stick/dp/1591841666

Free Prize Inside on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Free-Prize-Inside-Make-Purple/dp/1591841674/ref=sr

All Marketers Tell Stories on Amazon —https://www.amazon.com/All-Marketers-are-Liars-Works/dp/1591845335 

Akimbo — https://www.akimbo.me/

Kevin Kelly — https://kk.org/

Game of Thrones — https://www.hbo.com/game-of-thrones

Avengers Endgame — https://www.marvel.com/movies/avengers-endgame

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Tim Grahl and this is the podcast where we help you figure out, building author platforms, launching books and book marketing. In this episode, Valerie and I, we start off talking about Seth Godin and a recent couple of episodes of his podcast. I’m going to come back to Seth Godin in a minute.

Then we get into talking about tribes, where to locate them and then really how all of this stuff works together that we’ve been talking about a websites and email lists and all of that. Then we land in what I think is a really important place where we talk about different ways to look at finding your audience.

This can be a really hard – I mean, it’s hard for me as well especially with my own books but even when I’m working with clients, to continue to look at this from a new perspective. I think this is a really helpful episode, hopefully it will give you some new ideas about where you can find your audience and how to find your audience.

Also, coming back to Seth Godin, this is normally the part of the podcast where I tell you about something, right? You should hire one of our coaches, you should by one of my books, that kind of thing. And, I want to just mention here Seth Godin. I’m sure most of you are familiar with him and his work. Way back when I had my – I had graduated college and I got my first job and I hated that job.

You have to understand, when I was going through college, I remember talking to people when they would ask me what I wanted to do and I was like, I just want to get a good job where I can work hard, get a good salary and take care of my family.

The idea of being an entrepreneur and starting my own thing was never really something I thought I wanted. I graduated college, I got my first job and I just hated that job and I was convinced it was this place sucks, I need to just find a better place to work. I was there for a while and I found another job and I went there and it was literally within a couple of weeks I realized like my gosh, this place is worse than the place I left.

I really started getting scared thinking like, is this what I’m stuck doing, are there other options? I came across, when I was looking online for just – I don’t really know, inspiration or options or something and I came across Seth’s blog and it just really spoke to me and was my first glimpse in looking at the world in a completely new and interesting way.

I mean, that was probably 15, 16 years ago and so for that long, Seth’s work has been inspiring me and I think about his books, Tribes, which is probably the basis, the most foundational thing of all the work I do but his other ones like Purple Cow, The Dip, Free Prize Inside, All Marketers Are Liars which he renamed, I forget what he renamed it. All marketers are storytellers or something.

All of these books I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve read every single one of his books because he has a lot of books but I’ve read most of them and they all force you to look at the world in a new way and every time I’ve seen him speak or interacted with him, he just completely blows my mind.

I would recommend if you haven’t picked up a book from Seth Godin, if you’ve never read one, definitely pick up a copy of Tribes and give that a read but otherwise, if you know, if you just haven’t read something by Seth in a while, pickup copy of a book that you maybe have, buy a new one, it’s really good stuff, really inspiring and what I like about his work is that he’s consistent and he lives by his values.

I’ve worked with a lot of really well-known thought leaders or gurus or whoever and a lot of times, way more than any of us would like to know about, who they really are does not match their public persona and when push comes to shove, they kind of – they don’t really live the stuff that they write about and every time I’ve interacted with Seth. I know lots of people that interact with him as well, he’s always extremely consistent about holding to his values.

When he writes about something, I really trust it because I think he really believes it. Anyway, that’s my long commercial for Seth Godin, I’m a big fan of his, he’s changed my life from afar in many ways and many times. Go pick up a copy of any of Seth’s books, you won’t be disappointed.

Okay, from there, let’s go ahead and jump into this episode and get started.

[INTRO]

[0:04:45.0] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[EPISODE]

[0:05:02.6] VF: Hello Tim, how are you this week?

[0:05:05.7] TG: I’m doing fine.

[0:05:06.8] VF: Good. Okay, this week, I wanted to continue our discussion on sales but before we begin that, I just wanted to mention a couple of things. I listen to Seth Godin’s podcast at Akimbo and the last two episodes have been about things that we’ve been talking about here on our show.

If anyone listening, also subscribes to Akimbo, check out the Fooled by Spectrum podcast because he talks about the 1,000 true fans and it’s exactly the thing that we were talking about when we talked about that and he said, if you have a 1,000 true fans then that’s your base and if you can hit 10,000 true fans, it’s a home run. I thought that was really interesting.

[0:05:49.3] TG: Yeah, I mean, that comes from, the original guy to talk about that was Kevin Kelly and the idea was, if you had a thousand fans that paid you a thousand dollars each for whatever you’re creating, no, hundred dollars each for whatever you’re creating, that’s $100,000. That’s a pretty good living for a creative.

It was kind of this base, it’s been a long time since I’ve read it, but the way I remember it is it was kind of this reaction to, you don’t have to be this like famous person to make a living as a creative. If you can just find a thousand people that like your work and are willing to pay $100 a year for whatever you’re creating, you can make $100,000 a year.

I’ve seen people that do all these stuff to refute it or argue or whatever and I don’t think he meant it as like this gold standard. I think it was just more of like hey, think this way instead of feeling like you have to be famous.

[0:06:50.7] VF: That makes sense.

[0:06:52.3] TG: With authors, it’s going to be a little different unless you’re churning out 10 books a year, you’re going to have to have a larger, if you’re coming out with one book a year, you know, you need to have 10,000 people giving you $10 a year, something like that. But it’s still just this kind of nice round number of like okay, well what do I really have to do to make $100,000 a year as a creative.

Then I also think, well, I don’t know where you’re going with this because I could keep going because then you can talk about, well you could have like different types of things, you’re making money on so that you’re not putting so much pressure on just your writing to make all the money or whatever.

I’m going to let you actually ask your question.

[0:07:36.4] VF: It was just more of a comment than anything because I remember when Seth came to talk to us at this Story Grid love story workshop. He mentioned something that I’d heard other people say before but for some reason, when he was explaining it, it clicked to me.

That most people only read one book a year. Yes, it’s entirely possible to become a billionaire author, we know it’s possible because JK Rowling has done it. Yes, it’s possible. But the ratchet that needs to happen to go from where someone like me where I am now in my career to there, it starts with finding that first 1,000 true fans. Well it starts really with writing a really great book.

I’m assuming that to me, that’s understood. Then, finding a thousand true fans for that and those thousand true fans, they start to tell their friends because they want to have someone to talk to about the book. Because the book is well written, you know, the second layer of fans say, for a lack of a better description, they start to tell another group of friends.

Remember that shampoo commercial or maybe you’re too young and I’m just too old. I can’t remember the shampoo commercial but it was, “I tell two friends and you tell two friends” and so on. Someone out there will remember what that shampoo commercial was for.

[0:09:01.7] TG: I have no idea what you're talking about.

[0:09:05.8] VF: Damn, I just feel old when this happens, it was probably in the 70s and you weren’t born yet, oh my god. Was it Pert? Plus maybe? I can’t remember. Anyway, it was a great shampoo commercial and they would divide up the screen and every time someone talks about an idea virus or something going viral or things spreading by word of mouth, this commercial from 40 years ago, 45 years ago, flashes through my mind because I can see the screen dividing.

It’s a great visual representation of how it works, it starts with one person who really loves the product and in this case, the product is a novel and wanting to share it with a friend because they want to be able to talk to someone about it.

You got to read this great book and well, we just had the same thing with Game of Thrones, where the last season has come out and it’s like okay, no spoilers, same with the Avengers Endgame. It’s the same type of ratchet effect and it’s entirely possible for it to happen in fiction but it really relies on you being the best writer that you can be and creating a story that people want to tell other people about.

I thought that was really interesting. Just reinforces the types of things that we kind of have already spoken about. The other episode is, I think it’s called Car Dealers and Your Future, what does that have to do with books, right? It sounds like nothing. But if you listen to his argument in it, he gets down to the point of permission marketing and having a mailing list.

People don’t want email anymore; they want me mail. You and I talked about this as well when we were talking about my book club and then my author updates and how the emails that I could send out were relevant to the subscribers. They were meeting what the subscribers wanted and what I needed.

I thought that was really interesting because he’s talking about it from in a totally different industry but it’s the same principle.

[0:11:11.4] TG: Yeah, I want to go back to the thing you mentioned about most people read one book a year. Because that’s true. I think the thing to remember as writers, it really is any marketing issue, you always want to go after the nerds first.

[0:11:29.1] VF: Absolutely.

[0:11:31.3] TG: You want to get people that read more than one book a year to read your book first. Because it’s an easier sell. If it’s somebody like me who is always reading the next book, getting me to give your book a try is going to be much easier than if it’s my one book that I’m taking on vacation this year.

I just wanted to mention that because sometimes, these stats are helpful and sometimes they’re not and I think sometimes it can be a little demoralizing to think, okay, well, most people read one book a year and I think what you’ve got to do is like find the person that’s reading a dozen or two dozen or three dozen books a year and get your slot into one of those.

It’s much easier to convert a nerd reader to give your book a try than it is somebody who reads very passively or once a year.

[0:12:30.9] VF: Well, this is why Kindle unlimited is so attractive for so many authors. Because it’s people who read so much that having a subscription is cheaper, right?

[0:12:40.1] TG: Yeah, I have that. Well, it was cool, because like, a friend of mine wrote this book series that I’m on the second book of and she was like, well I’ll just give you the book, I’m like no, I’ll get them on Kindle unlimited because then, I don’t pay for them but you do. You get paid for them.

[0:12:55.4] VF: That’s right.

[0:12:58.1] TG: I think it’s a cool system.

[0:12:59.4] VF: And book clubs and this goes back to other conversations that we’ve had where you’ve been asking me and I’m still searching for answers, where do these people hang out online or in groups or how do you target them? Because you're right. These are the people that you want to go after, the people who are reading, who are committed to a book club and reading a book a month is not a big deal to them, right? They’re looking for authors that no one else has heard before.  A new story, a new voice. They’re interested in that.

[0:13:36.2] TG: Yeah.

[0:13:36.8] VF: I thought, that was all – I mean, this is not new information but it was sort of reaffirming what I’ve been learning and it came from a totally different source. Sometimes you need to –

[0:13:48.6] TG: Yeah, that’s helpful.

[0:13:48.9] VF: Yeah. Okay, all right, I’m on the right track, this is – not that I doubted that you are putting me on the wrong track now, mind you?

[0:13:59.6] TG: Sometimes you have to hear it, well, you experienced this with your children where they come home and they’re like, I learned this thing and I’m like, I’ve been trying to teach you that for like years. Totally understand.

[0:14:13.3] VF: Yes, my son is living in Montreal for the summer and he’s working at a restaurant and he texted me yesterday to say that Gwyneth Paltrow had come into the restaurant and then he proceeded to tell me who Gwyneth Paltrow was and I’m like, oh my. “That’s iron man, you remember Iron Man, mom? She plays Iron Man’s wife.” I’m like, “Yeah. Okay. Thanks honey.”

I remember her before she was anybody. Okay, back to selling, all right, here’s what I know about selling, it’s going to take all of three seconds for me to tell you. One, I know that selling is doing something for someone, not to someone. You're not trying to push things at people that they don’t want. What you’re trying to do is match the product or service you have with the need that the customer has, okay?

That means that I’m not trying to sell my books to people who one, aren’t interested in reading very much or two, aren’t interested in reading the type of books that I write. Okay, very high level concept but that much I got. The other thing I know about it is that you’ve got to make them want the thing you have and you don’t sell the thing, you sell the benefit of the thing.

Now I’m stuck. That’s as far as I can go. These are all high level concepts which took me a long time to sort of wrap my head around and observe as I do case studies and stuff like that. My question is, how do I get from there to where I want to go.

What are the practical steps, even the next steps, I don’t even know what the next steps are, practical or not.

[0:15:53.9] TG: You lost me a little bit. What do you mean?

[0:15:56.5] VF: Okay, there’s – if I picture my personas, my ideal readers out there, they’re looking for books like mine and I have to sort of let them somehow let them know that my books exist and to convince them to give my books a try. How do I do that?

[0:16:17.2] TG: Okay. I like to start with the end and then kind of work backwards. A very simple way to do this is with the three emails that people get when they sign up, we went through that, right? That’s one some simple way is knowing that within a week of somebody subscribing to your email list, you’re asking them to buy a copy of your book.

Because those emails, upsell your book. Then you know that everybody that gets on your email list is going to get a pitch to buy your book within the first week. Then you know that when you go on a podcast or speak at a conference or whatever and you invite people to join your email list, you know that they’re going to get pitched the book within a week of signing up for the email list.

A lot of it is creating that kind of system where people are automatically getting sold your book when they sign up for the email list. Am I answering the question you’re asking?

[0:17:22.1] VF: Yes, so far, those things I have in place.

[0:17:26.0] TG: Then it kind of becomes two things. One is, you have to keep doing outreach to keep getting more people on your email list. So we have talked a lot about outreach but you’ve got to keep growing your email list and then you’ve got to keep basically pitching your book to your audience in different ways and so have you thought through, what are the benefits, if I was to say what are the benefits of somebody buying or reading your book, what would you say?

[0:17:57.6] VF: Well the way I am pitching it is that each part is the length of a glass of wine or a soak in the tub or commute home. So it is a short read. It is not a huge commitment and it is a chance to escape and relax.

[0:18:12.3] TG: So I like the end of that the best, right? So it is a way to escape and relax and the other thing that I think you can do that would be helpful that we have talked a lot about here is say things like, “If you love this author you’d love this book” or “If you love this book, you will love this book.” Give people some context around that because it shows them that if they really enjoyed reading these types of books they are really going to enjoy your book as well because that implies the benefits, right?

“If you enjoy this then you will enjoy this” because the whole thing with fiction in particular is enjoyment and relaxation, escape, all of those things you just said but we are basically doing it for entertainment and enjoyment and so I think leaning into that is important and this is where I think that a lot of times, fiction authors really struggled because they think I don’t know what the benefit of reading my book is and I am always like, “Well have you read a fiction book? Why do you like reading fiction?”

Whatever it is that makes you like fiction is why other people will like your fiction and so use that as well and so I think in most cases for you, if you are speaking to the right audience, it is a pretty simple pitch of just like, “I write fiction for women that are in a hurry. If you like book X, Y or Z or authors X, Y and Z then you’re going to love a copy of my book. I think you’ll really enjoy it. You should go download the first part here.” I don’t think it is much more complicated than that.

Because once you have your pitch down it becomes just getting in front of more people so that you can give your pitch to people that it begins to have an impact. Does that make sense?

[0:20:07.4] VF: Okay, so the pitch then you’d need to have a couple of variations of it depending on the type of outreach you are doing, right? Like you need to have sort of shorter versions, say if you are doing a podcast interview then you have time to talk and you have time to explain what the story is about and that would be the longest form but then if you are doing something like an add or even a social media post, it is really short. So you would need to have something really – Some really short punchy version of that pitch, right?

[0:20:46.3] TG: Sure, so one thing is, you need to have your one sentence down, right? So mine is always, ‘I help authors build their platform, connect with readers and sell more books.’ I have said that thousands of times and so having your one sentence about, ‘I write fiction for women in a hurry that loved authors, whatever’ like maybe that is one, and this is one of those things where you should probably write out 20 or 30 different ones to find one that you really like.

And then you just memorize it and just say it every chance that you get. So on a podcast yeah, you will have a longer form to talk about stuff but at the end of the podcast, the podcaster is going to say, “Well how can people find out more about you?” and you say, “Well I write fiction for women in a hurry that like authors X, Y and Z. If you’d like to download the first part of my book, you can get it valeriefrancis.com/part1” or whatever you come up with.

So you need to have something really tight then you just use that over and over. So that can go in an ad that can go in. Actually if you are running ads, you could test five or six different one of these to see which one converts better and then make that your tagline. That would be an interesting experiment but whatever it is you need to have a very short, “This is what I do and here is how you can get it” and you need to be able to say it in a way where like if I woke you up at a dead sleep and said tell me what you do, you’d be able to say it. You know what I mean?

So that is the biggest thing because it just continually brings people in and then you just need new and interesting ways and not even interesting, you just need constantly new ways to get in front of it. You know I mean sometimes I think when I say “new and interesting” like again, we talked about this but it is hard to over say how much of a boring grind it is. So I don’t think you need to come up with new and interesting ways to get in front of people, you just need to get on another 20 podcasts.

[0:23:12.3] VF: Right and that is something that I am noticing. You know I don’t bring it up every single week because we would just be saying the same thing every single week but I am still doing all of those research in the background of looking for podcast, looking for book clubs, all that kind of stuff. It is a slow steady process and it is not sexy but there it is. It is effective.

[0:23:36.3] TG: Yeah and so that is like most of the work is that first getting all of that set up, right? So making all of the decisions about what you are promoting and how you are presenting yourself to the world then translating that into your website and your email list and all of that and then figuring out how you are going to talk about that and invite people in but then you just have to keep going out and getting a chance to say that to more people.

And again, it is lots of different ways like, if you do meet an author that writes woman’s fiction and she is up to sending a link out to where people can download the first part of your book, you know, it is like there you go. That is a really great intro but all you are going to do is you are going to set up maybe a special page for that partnership but it is going to put them into the same system you have already built.

[0:24:35.8] VF: Right.

[0:24:38.5] TG: So right now, I am going back and forth with a software they do. They had a software that helps authors with their marketing and I am trying to get them to let me do a three-part video series that they promote to all of their users and their audience and email list as a way to provide value to them but they sign up – they have to give me their email address to get it. So I am just looking for any ways that I could partner with other people that I think have an audience that would be interested in what I am doing.

[0:25:17.0] VF: And the pitch then just to come back to what we were talking about a minute ago, the pitch that I come up with when I am crafting my 20 different examples has to pitch my book in a way that meets the needs of the reader, right? If what my reader really wants is to escape for 20 minutes and not have any children touching her for a few minutes just to be left alone and have peace and quiet for 20 minutes, if that’s what she wants then I have to describe my book in a way that enables her to connect with that and to relate with it and to say, “Ah this is what I need.”

[0:25:55.6] TG: Yeah and I think it might take some trial and error in trying out a few different ones to see which ones seems to get the best reaction but then once you find one that works that just becomes your kind of go-to thing, does that make sense?

[0:26:09.9] VF: It does.

[0:26:10.8] TG: I could you see you, so I have a friend who has a middle grade series and his entire probably 90% of his marketing has been finding stay at home and home school moms, reaching out to them on Instagram, sending them a free copy of his book, the first book in the series and then following up then offering to do a giveaway to their audience of all of the books in the series and then that person posts on their Instagram feed, “Hey follow us and leave a comment” or leave a comment and tag a friend or something like that to enter this promotion.

And then his book gets exposed to the three thousand, 10,000, 50,000 Instagram followers of that person. I think that doing stuff like that would be good for you because it is women – because the more that you talk about it the more you are saying you know it is women with children, write that, just have 5 minutes or 20 minutes to read here and there is your audience. So where can you find pockets of those women and get them to give your book a try?

So that could be something that you could be doing to get your book out into the world. Again, it is always where are people congregating that fit your personas, who is the tribe leader of whatever that congregation is happening and how can I get my book in the hands of that person and get them to introduce me to their tribe?

[0:27:56.4] VF: Oh no, I never thought about thinking about mom groups. I did think about them when I was – because I started with the middle grade fantasy, right? That is my first book, it is a middle grade fantasy, and I was thinking about mom bloggers and that kind of stuff then but I hadn’t been – for some reason I never thought about them for this. Okay, I have to put my thinking cap on and have a look and see what is around for that because I bet you there is a lot more in a way of podcasts. I don’t know, maybe. Yeah, I have to think about it and see what is out there to broaden the search.

[0:28:27.7] TG: I mean, I am looking at your personas right now and your persona number one is Jennifer and her profession is stay at home mom. So where are stay at home moms congregating on the Internet and who are they following? I mean if you start scratching the surface, there are hundreds of these mom Instagram feeds that have 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 followers.

[0:29:04.6] VF: There is bazillion book reviewers on Instagram that is what I have discovered, holy Hannah.

[0:29:10.3] TG: Yeah, I mean so I like talking high level about things but this is really deep too of like or very tactical of right now Instagram is probably the biggest social media platform as far as engagement and growth. Actually engagement for sure I have looked at the numbers and so I look at Instagram or I look at social media two ways that are useful. One is it is a one-on-one connection. It is really good for connecting with people one on one not one to many.

And it is much easier to leverage other people’s followings and build your own, right? If you can get 10 people with 10,000 followers each to put their book in their feed that is a 100,000 people you have reached without having to build your own following of a 100,000 people and the biggest thing again is it’s so funny when I talked to my buddy about this because it is like, he sits – like when he is watching TV at night, he gets on Instagram and he goes through and sends, messages people.

That stay at home moms, mom Instagramers and says, “Hey” copy and paste, “I’ve got this book, I’d love to send you a copy” and anybody that responds the next day he just sits at his kitchen table and packs books in envelopes and then ships them out and then two weeks after he ships them out he follows up, “How did you like the book?” if they say they like it he offers to do a giveaway to their audience and most of them take them up on it.

So it is this like four to six-week process per person that is just a daily 15 to 30-minute thing. You know when he got his book deal they only agreed to publish the first two in the series and now they are publishing the entire series of nine because they have been selling so well and this is 90% of what he is done for marketing.

[0:31:07.1] VF: Okay.

[0:31:08.6] TG: But if you look at it, it is doing exactly what we are talking about, which is who are my personas, who are the tribe leaders that have followings, where are those people showing up, what would be a win-win that I could reach out and offer, right? So the first is a free book. The second is doing a giveaway to their audience.

[0:31:29.4] VF: Okay. All right, I have to put on my thinking cap on and see. Isn’t that funny? I am the one who created those personas and it never occurred to me to look at it like this. I guess that is why they pay you the big bucks.

[0:31:43.1] TG: That’s right.

[0:31:44.8] VF: All right.

[0:31:45.3] TG: So I mean looking at your other ones, it’s like okay, so I am looking at persona number three, Elizabeth. Her profession is in male-dominated professions, sciences and engineering. I guarantee you there are monthly groups in major cities of women that get together that are in the sciences and engineering. I guarantee you there are forums. I guarantee you there are email lists. I guarantee you there’s probably official organizations, you know what I mean?

That speak directly to women in the sciences and then it becomes the same kind of thought experiment, which is, okay, where are these women congregating? We talked about a few probably, who is in charge of those groups, how can I create a win-win that would allow me to introduce myself to those groups?

[0:32:35.7] VF: This is more homework.

[0:32:38.1] TG: More, that is my favorite part of these calls is like I give you stuff to do and then I am done until next week.

[0:32:44.2] VF: That’s right. Just because I don’t come back every week and say, “Here is all the wonderful things I found” doesn’t mean I am not doing them, but this is something that I think is a stumbling block for a lot of authors is that it takes time to do this research and it takes consistent effort overtime to do the research, because you can’t stop writing in the meantime just to stop and market. You got to keep everything moving.

[0:33:08.4] TG: And two things, one is I think this is really good because by default you should be getting on podcasts, right? That is the one I use all the time, but there are a 100 different ways to do this and it is very particular to the type that your personas, your book, where you should be reaching out and so that is one thing and the other is it does become easier overtime, right? So once you start working with one group, it is easier to get in with other groups. So it has a flywheel effect where then it just becomes – I mean it still takes work but it doesn’t seem so overwhelming.

[0:33:54.1] VF: All right I am holding you to that.

[0:33:56.9] TG: That’s right.

[0:33:58.8] VF: Okay, well I’d better go and start doing some more research.

[0:34:02.3] TG: All right, until next week.

[0:34:03.9] VF: Thank you, Tim.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:34:04.7] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

When asked what the most important aspect of book marketing is, it is tempting to supply a list of tools such as email lists and social media. However, these don’t actually teach you how to ask people to buy your book without being spamy of coming off as desperate. The answer to this question might really surprise you. Many writers are not necessary confident sales people and are often apologetic about what that they’ve created, and this is where the major problem lies. We are here today to tell you why selling your book has got more to do with your mindset than with clever sales techniques and why you need to learn to recognize the worth of your time, effort and artistic abilities. To find out how to sell your book and convince others to invest, do not miss out on this episode of the Book Launch Show!

Key Points From This Episode:

• How authors’ insecurities about their work negatively impact their ability to sell.
• The importance of remembering that readers buy books for selfish reasons.
• Adopting a perspective that your book will be beneficial to whoever reads it.
• Making the shift to recognize that your book is valuable to people other than just you.
• The advantage of selling a self-help book versus selling a novel.
• Why you begin selling when you believe that your book is good and adds value.
• How the writer is responsible for creating the world in which their book has worth. 
• Talking about your book and about why you love it and what others have said.
• Remembering that the platforms you create are ultimately for making sales and generating an income.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Your First 1000 Copies on Amazon —  https://www.amazon.com/Your-First-Copies-Step-Step-ebook/dp/B00DMIWAIC

Needful Things on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Needful-Things-Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501143786

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. This is Tim Grahl and in this episode, we talk about how to sell your book. Now, you may be thinking this is what we’re always talking about on this show but not necessarily. Valerie brings up a good point that there is a lot of information about how to build your platform, build your email list, social media, all this stuff, but they don’t actually like, teach how to sell your book, how to actually ask for the sell and get somebody to buy a copy of your book.

She asked me this question, we start talking about what it means to sell your book and how do you actually ask for this sale and this took me back to a question I had been asked years ago that I had to struggle to come up with an answer to.

Most of the time, when I get asked questions about book marketing I immediately have an answer, I’ve been doing this stuff for so long, but this one took me a minute to answer and when I came up with the answer, I was kind of surprised. It has to do with selling your book. Now, it’s not a tactic, it’s not like a certain way to sell your book, it’s just a mindset that I think is extremely important.

It’s a really good episode about stepping into selling your book and the kind of mindset you need to bring to that. Before we get into that, I want to mention, I have two books for sale that I think that you will get a lot out of if you haven’t already picked up copies. The first is Your First 1000 Copies, it’s all about how to build your author platform from scratch, how to think about it, the framework I use, talked about a lot of the ideas on this show.

Valerie’s even mentioned the book on the show. If you haven’t yet, pick up a copy of that book. I was just talking to somebody yesterday who bought it back when it came out in 2003 and they still refer back to it whenever they’re thinking about marketing.

It’s a really great book, really stood the test of time. I think you’ll like it. If you have a book launch coming up, if you’re thinking about how am I going to release this book, I have a book for that as well. Book Launch Blueprint. It’s a book that teaches my framework and my ideas behind how I launch a book and both of those are available at Amazon.com and pick up a copy there but without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode.

[INTRO]

[0:02:17.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:02:26.9] VF: Hello Tim, how are you today?

[0:02:29.2] TG: I’m good, how are you?

[0:02:30.6] VF: I’m good, thank you. Today, I wanted to talk to you about something that to me feels like the elephant in the room. It’s actually the last chapter in Your First 1000 Copies and it’s all about sales. Every time that I am reading books about book marketing or listening to people talk about book marketing, they cover all kinds of great stuff but very few people actually talk about making the sale or you know, closing the deal.

I know why they do it but I know that a lot of writers, myself included, really feel – we don’t want to be smarmy, right? Because we’ve all had to deal with sales people who are like that shoving something in your face and we’ve all had or I’ve had other writers, essentially spam me with the buy my book type of things.

What I wanted to talk to you today about is how we can close the deal and actually sell our books in an effective way. How do we do that? That’s such a huge question and I know I’m not even being very specific in how I ask it. It’s because I’m still at the 30,000 foot view looking at this issue of actually making the sale.

[0:03:51.5] TG: Well, no. I mean, it’s a good question and it’s not as – it’s not the broadest question you’ve ever asked me. I mean, it’s a common thing because I’ve done a lot of like, sales training and that kind of thing like the – when I was running a consultant firm and stuff and they talk about that where you do everything up until the point that you’re supposed to ask for the sale and then you get scared and don’t ask for the sale.

Everything else you did right. This kind of came to me because this was a few years ago, whenever I was doing a Q&A somewhere, I was at a – I forgot, a workshop or conference or something. I was in a room with people and most of the time, when I do a Q&A, I never get asked a question I haven’t been asked a hundred times so I have an answer ready and I can talk about it and somebody asked me like, ‘What is the single most important thing to have for your book marketing? If I looked at all the successful authors I’ve worked with, what’s the common thread?’

You know, I immediately started thinking about the different tools, like an email list or big influencer friends but I could always think of an exception to the rule. I’ve worked with authors that didn’t have the email list, that successfully sold books, you know?

Whatever it was, I could find an exception. I had to kind of think about it and it took me a minute and then when I landed on the answer, I was almost a little embarrassed at the answer because it was so kind of woo-woo, you know? It wasn’t very – okay, you have to do this one thing, if you do this one thing, you’ll be successful. The truth is, the common thread that ran through all the authors that had successful books and repeatable successful books.

Because you have authors that they have like one book come out, it does really well and then they can never kind of replicate the process and those are always – I hate when people use those as examples because nobody really knows why those books –

Anyway, that’s a different discussion.

[0:06:06.1] VF: Well, that’s lightning in a bottle, right? Yeah.

[0:06:08.4] TG: Yeah. Really, the thing that I saw over and over is that the author truly believed it was the best thing that people could do with their 10 bucks was to buy a copy of their book. Most authors, if you really push them, don’t really feel like their books are worth the money that they’re paying, they’re charging for them.

They feel like everybody that buys their book, either they got lucky or the person didn’t really understand or you know, some kind of thing, it was like, I was joking with a guy, there’s this guy at Jiu Jitsu that everything I beat him, he’s like yeah, of course, because you’re better than me and then every time he beats me, he makes up an excuse about why he beat me. He’s like, well, you must be tired today or are you hurt?

Well, you know, I just got this thing on you and I’m like no, it’s because you’re better than me. There’s a real reason, you know? What I find is that, most authors kind of build up all this infrastructure around them like an email list, like a blog, like all the stuff and even getting a publisher so that they don’t have to actually face the fact that they need to ask people to buy a copy of their book.

The best way, I think the reason why people turn spamy in this is because they don’t even believe it, they’re kind of asking you to do them a favor by buying a copy of your book. I think, buying a copy of my book is like a deal. Most books, for the amount of either entertainment or emotional thrill or amount you’ve learned from them, they are like, the biggest bang for your buck, you know? I can’t even go to a movie for two hours for the price that I paid for most of the books I read.

Authors don’t really believe that about their own work. What happens is, is when it comes time to ask for the sale, they always pull back a little bit or they do things that are weird that’s kind of helping them keep distance. It will be things like, you know, please buy a copy of my book, I really need this today or we really need to make this happen and whenever I’m working with authors and they start slipping that into the language is like, no, you need to remind them that they’re not buying the book for you, they’re buying the book for themselves.

Some of them like your fans and people that know you will buy a book to help you out because they love you and they want to support your work. Most people, they’re buying books for a selfish reason. I mean, that’s why I buy all the books I do is for selfish reasons. I want to read the book, you know? I want to be entertained, I want to read a great story.

[0:08:51.1] VF: The sad truth is, a lot of readers don’t even remember the writer’s name. It pains me to say that, but it is true.

[0:09:01.8] TG: I think, most of the messes that come from either people just not doing the sales part are going to the side of being spamy is because they’re not looking out for the interest of the reader. Because I feel like you can get a copy of my book for Running Down a Dream for 9.99 on ebook, for 14.99 paperback and that’s the best 15 bucks you're going to spend this week.

You know, I really believe that and so when it comes time for me to pitch the book, it’s really easy because I’m trying to help you out from like, this will change your life, you should read this book, It’s only 15 bucks, go buy a copy, you know?

I feel like vast majority, like 90% plus, don’t actually feel that way. Even a lot of the really successful authors, when you get them in a room and talk to them about it, they almost try to forget that people have to pay for their books, you know?

Some of it is because some of this big authors get such huge advances that they never earn out and so the idea that people buy their book and therefore they get money off of that sale. They don’t really connect that in their mind. It’s like, this giant publisher gives me a big check, I write a book and turn it in and then, I’m done.

The idea that they’ve got to ask people to buy a copy of their book, almost seems like unseemly, you know? I look at it as like, you know, I’ve worked really hard on this, it’s a great book, I really believe that and you’re going to love it and you should spend your money on it because you’re just going to get way more value out of it than you spend on it.

If you compare the 99 that you spend on two cups of coffee and then join me, you got out of those and I love coffee, I get way more enjoyment out of a good book.

[0:10:59.4] VF: It’s a real shift, a mental shift because as writers, we’ve got to shift gears a lot because when we’re in the writing phase, that’s – we’re full on creativity and it’s our darling, it’s our baby and we are creating something.

Then we flip over to editor mode, we take out the red pen, we’ve got to be ruthless. Once all of that is done, then we have to stop looking at it as a piece of art. It is still a piece of art but if our goal, like my goal is to earn a living as a writer, we’ve got to stop looking at it as a piece of art and look at it as a commodity, as a product to be sold on the market.  That’s another shift again, right?

[0:11:47.7] TG: Well, I wouldn’t go that far, I don’t – because then I start thinking like you’re putting it into the same category as like, you know, buying a coffee maker. You know, I think you can think of as art. It’s still art and art is valuable to people, it’s a valuable thing. Asking somebody to participate in being a part of that value by buying a copy of your book is fine.

I mean, I think you can a little bit, you know, I almost feel like trying to make the switch to this is just a commodity, this thing, it is this widget I’m trying to sell, will also lose some of the soul. Because it’s like, it’s not just a commodity. It’s not something that was produced on an assembly line, it wasn’t produced by an engineer, it wasn’t produced by a team of people, it was produced by you.

You know, taking ownership and assigning value to that, I think is a good thing. I think the shift is, you actually thinking it’s worth something to somebody other than yourself. That’s the shift. It’s not, okay, now I’ve got to treat this like a commodity, it’s more like, well no, now I have this thing.

Let’s say you told stories for a living, right? You could only tell stories to so many people at a time. Where putting it in a book form allows more people to enjoy the story than could otherwise enjoy it. It’s still just the story that you created but you put it in a package that is easily digestible and allows it to spread and is very affordable.

I feel like it’s not about selling a commodity, it’s about recognizing the value in your own work. You know, what I tell people especially fiction writers. I think that this is where self-help writers have it a little easier because if I’m teaching you how to make more money or save time or lose weight.

It’s like a really clear kind of what you get out of reading this book and putting it into practice. But then with fiction, you’re like, well, it’s just a story, how do you price this stuff? Well, first of all, there’s already some parallels, right? You pay $15 for a movie, depending on where you live.

You already buy books, right? There’s already like a pricing structure that people have assigned value to these things. The other is like, for most writers, if you compare the amount of enjoyment they get out of reading fiction versus nonfiction, it’s always fiction. There’s like a joy from it, there’s meaningful to it, there’s a – it changes your mind, it messes with you emotionally, there’s all the highs and lows, all of those things.

We believe that about other people’s writing but we don’t believe that about our own writing. My thing is, before you start trying to sell, you need to go off and like journal or pray or whatever you do and get yourself to a point where you actually believe about other people’s writing, you believe that about your own writing. Then, selling becomes easy.

Because you’re just inviting people to be a part of something that you think is actually good for them, right? If you found the cure for cancer, you’re not saying writing’s a cure for cancer but if you found the cure for cancer, you wouldn’t shut up about it. You know, you would tell everybody.

[0:15:38.4] VF: That’s right.

[0:15:39.3] TG: I feel like that with the book of like, if you truly believe your book is worth reading, you’ll tell people about it and you’ll invite them to buy it and you won’t feel at all guilty or weird about it and it will come across that way. Again, the people that come across as spamy is they feel disparate and they are again, I come back to they have this attitude that you are doing them a favor by buying your book and I think it is the other way around. I am doing you a favor by only charging 15 bucks for this thing because it’s worth more. So that’s my thing on the beginning level of sales that you actually have to believe that your work is something people should spend money on and if you don’t believe that yet, you need to go fix that first and then talk about how to sell after that.

[0:16:30.7] VF: And as writers, we need to be comfortable accepting money for it too because I don’t know what it is like in the States. I don’t know my own experience but there’s this conversation sort of being whispered in the shadows of conference rooms and so forth that you know art is somehow taking money for your art devalues the art. Now personally I have never believed that and I have a hard time wrapping my head around it because like you just said, I have never had any problem paying for a book or a CD or going to a movie or buying the Blu-ray or downloading it and all of that is art. Do you come across that or?

[0:17:11.7] TG: Oh yeah, so here’s the thing. So Candice my wife, she is almost done, she is about to graduate to be therapist, a licensed professional therapist, and we have both been in therapy a long time. The one thing you learn as you dive into therapy about yourself and other people is people make up really elaborate fascinating and convincing stories of why you should let them live in their own filth emotionally. Well there is all these reasons why this is this way and it is like well, does it have to be that way?

Well yeah, so all of that stuff is just complete bullshit that people make up to make themselves feel good about the fact that they just drowned in resistance. The idea that it devalues, that doesn’t make any sense, like the idea that it devalues your work to take money for it, money is how people show that something is valuable. People take things for free that they don’t think are valuable. You get brochures and flyers for free and coupons for free.

Things that people don’t value. People pay money for things that they value and so if you are an artist you should be getting paid to be an artists and I mean, I am sure there are people that love to do their art just for the sake of doing their art and they don’t mind giving it away and they’ve got some other means of income, whether they live off of money they have or they have a job that they don’t mind and they paint at night or whatever, but for most artists I think if you don’t value it nobody else will.

I mean that’s what it comes down to is that this is – I talk to people when they are trying to start their businesses. A lot of people when they start trying to start their businesses they start to hire people to do all the stuff they are scared to do. I am going to hire a marketing director to do all of the marketing because I am not very good at marketing and I am like, “Okay nobody is going to care about your business like you care about your business so that is your job” you know?

And I feel like that with your book and your art. It’s like, if you don’t value your art, nobody else is. So sure, tell yourself whatever bullshit lie you want of why you shouldn’t charge for it that’s fine. Just understand you’re the one that is creating the world in which your art has no value. So I feel like art has value. I pay for art in various forms, I actually just this morning or last night actually, have this little painting I bought from a local artist here in Nashville and it sits on my nightstand.

And it is the first thing I see every morning. It is a picture of a sunrise and I told Candice that I love every morning I wake up and I get to look at this and I get to see a sunrise before I look out the window and I paid for that like if he had given it to me, I wouldn’t have taken it as valuable and so I think that is such bullshit and I think it is people that are just steeped in resistance and just don’t think their own art is worth anything and therefore they make up all of these bullshit about how art –

You shouldn’t charge for your art that is just fucking crazy and to me, to put that on other artists, if you want to believe that yourself fine, but to make up this sweeping statement that that applies to everybody is just crazy, and so yeah, I don’t obviously buy into that at all.

[0:20:58.0] VF: So once we believe that our books are valuable and provide value to whomever is reading them, what is the next step? How do we then go about creating an environment where people want the books that we’ve written?

[0:21:18.3] TG: So I mean the first thing is to just talk about them. Talk about the books, talk about why you love the books, share what other people have said about why they love the books. So I am trying to decide how practical to get this because you don’t have an entire program on how to do a book launch that is a lot of information. We can go over any of that or all of it over the next few episodes, but if you are thinking right now I am on maintenance mode on Running Down a Dream, right.

So it is not about a launch. It is about keeping sales coming in and my thing is that I am always looking for opportunities to talk about it, tell stories from the book, share what it was like to write the book, share stories of people that have emailed me talking about what it’s done for them and just talk about the book from the space of “my book is valuable and everybody should read it”. I think once you are there, once you are living in that space, it just becomes talking from that space.

So when you send out emails to your email list, you can say things like, “Oh by the way, I just got this email from a reader” and you just share four or five sentences about how much they love the book and just say, “If you like to read the book too, you can get it here” for whatever price and just link to Amazon or where they could get it. Constantly be inviting people to buy a copy of the book reminding them, “Hey, if you haven’t bought a copy of the book yet, you should check out the three new reviews that are on Amazon. Click here to read them.”

It is just constantly inviting people to buy a copy of the book and again, remembering all of this stuff we talk about are platform the only reason you are doing this is so that you can sell the books and it just drives me insane. One time I had worked with this author for years and then we stopped working together then I noticed he had a new book coming out and it was like less than a month away. So I shot him an email and this guy had at the time, Facebook was still –

Like if you had a really big Facebook group, those people were super involved. So we had these huge Facebook group following and he had a really big email list like over 50,000 people.

[0:23:40.6] VF: Wow.

[0:23:41.7] TG: And I shot him an email. I was like, “Hey, your book is coming out, what are you doing for the book launch?” like we are still buddies. So I just was checking in and like, “What are you doing for your book launch?” he’s like, “Oh I think I’ll send an email out the day that it comes out” and I’m like, “Why are you…” –

[0:23:59.6] VF: Have you learned nothing?

[0:24:00.5] TG: Well my thing is like, “Why are you building an email list? Why are you putting all of this time into a Facebook group? Like, why?” it is like the people that work really hard and they make a lot of money and then they don’t spend any of it. They just put it in the bank. It is like what is the point, you know? So I feel like reminding yourself like you are putting all of these time and effort into building this platform so that you can sell books.

So you should be constantly selling books with it and if that bother’s people, you kindly invite them to unsubscribe. Because I have dealt with that too, especially with clients where people – they will blog every week for two years and give away tons of content and then when they ask people to buy a book, people are like, “This is bullshit” I’m like, “Fuck you, you just got two years of free content and I am asking you to spend $9”, you know?

Man that stuff drives me crazy. So yeah I think just remembering like you are building the platform to sell books. Your book, people spending money on your book is a really good thing for them. It is good for you but it’s actually better for them. I really believe that if you want to hire me to coach you through what is in Your First 1000 Copies I would charge you for thousands of dollars to teach you that stuff.

[0:25:28.8] VF: I know you would.

[0:25:30.3] TG: You know I have done workshops, yeah and to teach it in a workshop live you would spend at least a thousand dollars and you can get it for $9 on Amazon. That is a killer deal for you. You are helping me, yeah I get a few dollars off of there. I don’t know how much it is right now but if it is $9.99 I make my $7 and that is fine but what you get out of that, you end up – it is a win-win but the win for you is bigger. You know I believe that about books in general.

I am in the middle of reading Needful Things by Stephen King and I am just loving it and it is a great book so far. I don’t know how it ends yet, don’t tell me, but already the value I have gotten out of that is far more than whatever I paid for, you know? And so I think if you bring that into that and you then talk from that standpoint, so then when you deal with stuff we’re talking about and you are on a podcast and people are like, “Hey where should people go to find out more about you?”

You say, “Well you could go to my website, you can join my email list and by the way right now my book is $9.99 on Amazon, you should go buy a copy. You are going to love it, it is a great book, look at all the reviews and then email me and let me know what you think.” That comes so easy and does not sound spammy, it does not sound pushy when it is coming from a place of confidence. So I think in future episodes we could get into practicalities of launches.

Or what and how exactly the word stuff or whatever you want to go over but I think that that is the elephant in the room. It’s like you can do all the tactics, you can build the email list, you could build the blog, you can build the blog, you can blah-blah-blah-blah but if comes down to it and you don’t want to actually believe that people should spend money on your book, it just won’t ever really come together.

[0:27:23.2] VF: So for now at this stage where I am just starting to get on podcasts, I am still really in the early stages of my book club and my monthly email out to subscribers, what I really need to be doing at this stage is just talking about my book and who it’s for, not directly, but giving indications of who it’s for and showing the benefits of what’s in it for the reader. What is in it for the person who sees, say a post on Facebook, about a book club because that is what I am doing.

It’s got my email list, I’ve got the podcast and then I am posting about the book club and the writer’s – what do they call it? A writer’s life, putting that on social media. That is what I am doing right now.

[0:28:14.9] TG: I think that’s good yeah and then make sure every email or every other email that you send out you remind people like, “Hey if you haven’t read the first book in the series you could grab that here and you could grab the second book. The other books in the series here” and I mean you probably, I think just knowing you, you are a little more comfortable with this than most writers but I think it is just keeping in mind the point of all of this is to sell books.

So I believe if you keep that in mind from the place of my book is worth way more than whatever I am charging for it and you put those together, it starts naturally happening. It starts when people ask you when you are in outreach mode, when you are on a podcast how people can find out more. You just tell people to go buy a copy of your book, because I am here to sell books and I think that my book is valuable, so then it is easy.

So I think that’s the thing because then it starts looking at then you start weaving it into everything that you are doing and again you do it in these ways that aren’t, some people will get annoyed and that’s fine, but that aren’t spammy and aren’t desperate. You know the spammy and desperate thing go together. When you believe that like, “Yeah I get my $7 but you get $300 in value from this book” when you really believe that, then you don’t feel desperate.

You’re like, “Man I am just trying to help you out if I get you to buy a copy of my book” yeah. So from that standpoint, you start weaving them in and again we can talk about specifics on future episodes but yeah, that is the idea and then you have that mindset everywhere you go.

[0:30:06.8] VF: Okay, well I am definitely going to take you up on that because I know I want to talk more about it with you and I know people listening are going to want to hear those specifics too.

[0:30:16.1] TG: Yeah, sounds good.

[0:30:17.6] VF: All right, thank you so much Tim. I really appreciate this.

[0:30:19.9] TG: Thanks Valerie.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:30:21.5] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website, booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you’d like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com, we’ll see you next week.

[END]

Today on the Book Launch Show, Tim and Valerie have a conversation about Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, exploring how someone new to the writing and publishing world can begin to gather a loyal following. They talk about engaging with fans in the most effective way so that you steadily build your audience and set yourself up with a strong fan base in the future. While many authors are out there chasing the algorithm of writing a specific number of books in specified time frames, Tim and Valerie discuss why this might be the quickest way to sell, but certainly not the most sustainable. Writing to meet the expectations of a particular platform is not only exhausting, but it also steals the joy that your passion for writing used to evoke. If you’re interested in hearing more on these topics, don’t miss out on this episode!

Key Points From This Episode:

• When cross promotions work and don’t work well and going about it thoughtfully.
• The importance of understanding why a marketing tactic succeeds or fails.
• Discerning the difference between constructive and destructive information out there.
• Why chasing the algorithm of producing and publishing all the time is not sustainable.
• The problem with relying on Amazon and why you need to determine your own rules.
• There are no short cuts to writing good books and creating a sustainable income from it. 
• Applying Seth Godin’s concept of tribes to a writer’s understanding of fans.
• How a lot of the fan activity we see from other artists is organically produced.
• What you can do to start communicating with your fans and set yourself up for future success.
• Trying to establish personal communication versus public communication with fans.
• Progressing from your fans talking to you to talking to each other.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Book Launch Coaching — https://booklaunch.com/coaching/

Marketing resources — https://booklaunch.com/book-marketing-resources/

Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/

Tribes on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Tribes-We-Need-You-Lead-ebook/dp/B001FA0LAI

Black Irish Books — https://blackirishbooks.com/

AWeber — https://www.aweber.com/

Fiverr — https://www.fiverr.com/

Nora Roberts — http://www.noraroberts.com/books/

Avengers Endgame — https://www.marvel.com/movies/avengers-endgame

Captain Marvel — https://www.marvel.com/movies/captain-marvel

Shazam! — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448115/

Neil Gaiman — http://www.neilgaiman.com/

Taylor Swift —  https://www.taylorswift.com/

Ian Rankin — https://www.ianrankin.net/

J.K Rowling — https://www.jkrowling.com/

Slack — https://slack.com/

Barnes & Noble — https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Craft + Commerce Conference — https://conference.convertkit.com/

World Domination Summit — https://worlddominationsummit.com/

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to The Book Launch Show. I am Tim Grahl and this week’s episode is really fun for me. Years and years ago, I read this book, Tribes by Seth Godin. It really became the foundation of everything that I do in book marketing, it’s one of those that just changed the way I see the world, which is pretty much how every Seth Godin book hits me.

I used to tell my wife that it felt like – none of his books really tell you what to do, they just completely change your mind, change the way you see the world and now you’re left to pick up the pieces and try to rebuild your life. I said, I always felt like it created this itch on my back, I couldn’t quite reach. That’s what Tribes is, it just completely changed the way that I go through the world and I see the world and a lot of what I teach on book marketing, the foundational principles are looking at the world in terms of tribes.

Well, every author’s goal and dream is to build their own tribe, their own set of raving fans that love everything they do and tell everybody about them and help them sell their books and on and on. Valerie’s questions are like, what can you be doing now, early in the process, tot set yourself up for success like that in the future, to start building up that following that will help you long in the future.

For me it’s a fun conversation, it’s an interesting conversation to look at how do you cultivate raving fans, especially when you don’t have any fans right now? I think it’s an interesting conversation, something worth talking about and worth looking at. It’s one of those you know, if you don’t know where you’re going, what is that old cliché?

If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time, right? I think looking at it from this perspective where I don’t have a huge audience yet but I want to go ahead and be doing the kinds of things that will create a tribe of people around my work. It’s a fun conversation, I think you’ll get a lot out of it. Before we get into that, I just want to remind you of two things.

The first is, my book, Running Down a Dream is still available. I highly recommend it. We’ve now hit 119 reviews. Mostly five stars. I think my favorite negative review, let me think if I can get this right. Says, yeah. I think it was on Goodreads, it was probably the shortest review and my favorite negative review of any of the work I’ve ever done. It said, “poorly written and slightly misogynistic” which you know, maybe on both of those, but it’s a really good book besides what that one reviewer thought but if you look at the reviews, I just recommend you go and look at the reviews of Running Down a Dream.

I can’t really do them justice. Sometimes, they’re so nice and so complimentary that I have to double check to make sure it was my book that they were at. Go read the reviews of Running Down a Dream. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, I really recommend that you do.

Especially as a writer, you are going to face some struggles and some pitfalls and some low points that are really hard to come back from. I talk about those in the book, I talk about what it’s like to be there and how to claw your way out of it. Really good book, Running Down a Dream, it’s available at blackirishbooks.com and Amazon.

Also, if you are looking for some help with book marketing so I get emails still every week from people that are looking for help to build their platform, launch their book, all of those things. I’m currently not available and instead, I recommend that you go to booklaunch.com/coaching and check out the coaches we have available.

It’s a really great group of people, they’ve worked really hard, they’ve done a lot of work in book marketing with clients and then they’ve gone through all of my training and we can continue to stay in touch as they grow their knowledge and book marketing. If you want some help. Most of the people that you run into that are talking about book marketing that are willing to take your money to help you are not doing the kinds of things that we’re talking about on this podcast.

They’re running around, you know, helping you with your social media, helping you to get on like radio shows or something. Stuff that just doesn’t work. If you want somebody that really understands book marketing, how it works, highly recommend you check out some of the book coaches, really smart savvy people, they had to really work hard and prove themselves to get in that group.

Go there, booklaunch.com/coaching but without further ado, let’s jump into this episode and get started.

[INTRO]

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Book Launch Podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.

[EPISODE]

[0:04:53.3] VF: Hello, Tim.

[0:04:55.6] TG: Hello, hello.

[0:04:56.6] VF: How are you today?

[0:04:58.0] TG: I’m hanging in there.

[0:04:59.1] VF: You’re hanging in there.

[0:05:00.3] TG: That’s right.

[0:05:01.5] VF: Well, that’s better than not hanging in there I guess. Okay, I got a couple of updates. First of all, well, today is the first as we record this. I sent out my book club email and I just sent it out about an hour or so ago and I’ve already gotten a response. Someone really likes – yeah, they really liked it, that’s good, thumbs up. Keep going with that one.

From the update that I sent on the 15^th, I got a complaint on that on AWeber. It’s only one. I’m not really worried that I got a complaint but I was really curious to see if I could figure out where it came from because I’m always looking at this – that cross promotion list, right? I’m always curious to see if that’s actually doing anything.

I called AWeber and of course, they can’t actually tell you who did it or where it came from but they said, if someone complains about your email or marks it as junk or spam, they’re automatically unsubscribed from your list. That made it really easy because I only had one unsubscribe and it came from that cross promotion list. Isn’t that interesting?

[0:06:07.2] TG: There you go, yeah.

[0:06:08.4] VF: Fascinating.

[0:06:09.3] TG: Yeah, because they probably don’t remember signing up for your email list.

[0:06:13.4] VF: Probably not.

[0:06:13.9] TG: Because it was the cross promotion. That’s probably where it came from.

[0:06:19.4] VF: It’s a fascinating study in what not to do. Just watching them a spiral, right?

[0:06:28.7] TG: I think the biggest thing is to do these things thoughtfully because there’s cross promotions that work well, you want to do them thoughtfully, you want to make sure people understand what they are signing up for, you want to make sure you’re doing it with other people in your genre.

You know, there’s like ways to do it that work, you know?

[0:06:46.8] VF: That’s not the way that I did it.

[0:06:49.2] TG: Yeah. I just don’t want to – I don’t want people to think any cross promotions are wasted time because honestly, cross promoting with other authors is a great way to build your audience, you just have to do it in a kind of thoughtful – to me, it’s just putting yourself in the person’s shoes who is getting promoted to and making sure that they understand what’s going on.

[0:07:15.0] VF: Yeah, I mean, exactly. Because as I probably have mentioned this, I can’t remember. When I did the cross promotion, I was in the, I was trying to learn everything about this business at once. I was on Facebook and in the various Facebook groups, and this was the collective wisdom, what’s the saying? I don’t’ believe in the collective wisdom of idiots and not that those people were idiots but they didn’t know anything more about this than me, right? It was kind of the blind leading the blind.

I was sort of listening to the collective, the hive mind and this was the thing that you do and there were people getting together in some of the courses that I had been part of, even had groups where the students could come together and cross promote one another if they wanted to.

I thought well, I guess this is what you do, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me but I don’t know anything about this business so I guess I’ll give it a try. Even though my spidey senses were tingling, I did it anyway and now that I’m starting to learn a little bit about marketing and what this means, I’m starting to see all the reasons why my spidey senses were tingling in the first place a year and a half ago when I tried this, so it’s fascinating.

[0:08:31.0] TG: Yeah, it’s hard because it’s like, it’s also true that so much of the marketing stuff is counterintuitive. It’s hard to know when you’re doing something that your gut is saying, don’t do this, this is a bad idea, whether it’s just scared because it’s something new or whether it’s like no, I should have listened.

Because I’ve done stuff like that and like, I don’t know, this doesn’t – you know, I’m just going to do it and just see what happens and then it’s like, if it had turned out that you had built this – you gotten this huge list of great people that were buying your book, she’d be like hey, cross promotions are amazing, you know?

I don’t’ know what I was so worried about. I think experimenting with the things are fine and then just you know, I think the way you’re doing it is right where you're like, now, looking back at it and be like okay, well that didn’t work the way I thought it would, you know, what can I learn from it, how can I do it different instead of just like, I see so many authors just jumping from tactic to tactic.

Not really knowing why they’re doing any of the things they’re doing and then, the worst, honestly, to me, something worse than nothing working is when something works but you don’t’ know how or why so you can’t recreate the success.

[0:09:51.1] VF: Right.

[0:09:52.4] TG: I don’t’ think it’s necessarily a bad thing that you tried it, it’s just a good lesson to learn.

[0:09:56.8] VF: Right, it’s not the tactic that didn’t work, it was the approach to the tactic. Anyway, lots of lessons still being learned on that one. But it raises another issue that has been coming up in the last week or so I guess. I don’t know if you heard this story about this woman in Brazil who had hired ghost writers from Fiverr to write for her and they ended up plagiarizing Nora Roberts and like 40 other writers.

[0:10:23.9] TG: Yeah. I saw that. Because she got sued by Nora Roberts, right?

[0:10:27.2] VF: And 40 other writers, yes indeed.

[0:10:29.2] TG: Okay, I just saw the – I didn’t read too deep so I saw the headline and like the first paragraph.

[0:10:35.8] VF: Yes, well, I’ve seen little snippets of this all over but one of the things this writer said was, now I’m paraphrasing, but she kind of got caught up in the idea that she had to publish really quickly and frequently in order to make a go of this.

This again is one of the things that I was hearing when I started in this business and I don’t know if people are still talking this way or not. I’m sure there’s a group of people who are still thinking this way, but it was that you had to publish something to Amazon every 30 days to keep the algorithm fresh and all that kind of stuff.

People may still be trying to do that, I’m not aware of it because I’m not listening to that kind of conversation because it never made sense to me. One, I don’t know how anyone, I certainly could never write a book in 30 days, not without self-destructing or getting carpal tunnel or something. I just couldn’t do it; I’m not built for that at all.

But this is the type of information that this woman in Brazil was listening to and so she was trying to feed the beast. Which is kind of the same thing I was doing with that list, right? I was just listening to what was going on and following without thinking.

[0:11:49.3] TG: Yeah, I mean, that stuff is always interesting to me because I feel like people think it’s a shortcut even though it’s that chasing the algorithm thing that to me is just a losing battle. It’s like, they’re going to keep changing the algorithm to stop people that are gaming it because they don’t want people to game the algorithm.

If you are trying to game the algorithm, you are now in a race that will never end. It just to me is a treadmill that I’m not interested in getting on. I still am thinking like, yeah, if you’re having to write a book every 30 days, let’s set aside discussions on how good the book could possibly be and just the amount of work you’re having to put into it.

Is it that much better? I one time in my 20s turned my passion into a job and it killed my passion because it became a 60-hour week job and I could no longer enjoy the things that I was doing. I just wonder, is it that much better than just getting a job and writing on the side and I’m sure there’s plenty of people that would like argue me to the death over this because they’re like well, you know, I’m making X amount of dollars and you know, I’m writing, I’m a full time writer and it’s like, okay, if that works for you, I’m not going to talk you out of it.

It’s just, at some point, you’re going to crash, either you’re not going to be able to keep up or the algorithm’s going to change. I’ve heard of the writers where they were like gaming the algorithm and so they change the algorithm and their income got cut in half overnight. It’s just dangerous to do that kind of stuff because again, you’re building your platform on somebody else’s platform.

You’re 100% relying on Amazon to find you readers. If they change, you’re fucked. It’s like, you need to figure out a way to build something where if Amazon changes, you can still survive. Trying to keep up with the algorithm is to me, again, I look at, I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, the authors that I have worked with that are successful for a long period of time are not chasing an algorithm.

[0:14:15.6] VF: Right.

[0:14:17.5] TG: They’re writing good books and building a platform.

[0:14:19.2] VF: It’s the slow and steady work, consistency over time, right?

[0:14:23.8] TG: Yeah, I think people are like, I think it’s a short cut or something, I’m like sure, maybe short, short term but like, anyway –

[0:14:35.0] VF: Okay, all of this led me to another thought. My daughter and I went to a movie on the weakened, and of the 12 cinemas at the theater, eight of them were superhero movies. Because this past weekend was Endgame, right? Six of them were Endgame and then a Captain Marvel and a Shazam!

[0:14:53.6] TG: Yeah, I balled my eyeballs out.

[0:14:54.7] VF: At Endgame?

[0:14:56.1] TG: Yeah.

[0:14:56.3] VF: Okay, no spoilers, we haven’t seen it yet, there were too many holes in our list of Avenger movie viewing so we haven’t seen it yet. We went to see Shazam! instead which is pretty funny.

[0:15:06.0] TG: Yeah, well, it’s DC, it’s fine but it’s not horrible.

[0:15:12.3] VF: I’m so glad you said that because it speaks exactly to what I was thinking. When I was there, I like superhero movies, I would have been into them more if when I was growing up, I was actually allowed to read them, because where I’m from, when I was growing up, there were things that were appropriate for girls to read and things that were appropriate for boys to read.

Superhero comics were boy things and I was never allowed to read them.

[0:15:36.5] TG: You were like literally not allowed to read them or is it just more like weird if you did?

[0:15:41.3] VF: No, I remember in my school library, I wanted to borrow a book, it must have been fantasy because I remember there was a dragon on the cover and the librarian took it from me and said, no my love, this is not for you, this book is for you instead.

[0:15:56.5] TG: That’s awful.

[0:15:57.6] VF: I know, it’s terrible. But when you’re nine, you don’t speak up. Now, dad bought me comics and stuff but they were Archie which I don’t know if you’ve ever read Archie comic books but man, there’s some disturbing messages in that. Anyway.

[0:16:14.9] TG: Never read one.

[0:16:15.6] VF: Archie’s a tool. Anyway, moving on. I’m standing there in the theater and I’m looking around at the fans who were there. I’m listening to their conversations and I thought, okay, these are true fans. They’re going to come, they’re going to stand in line to get tickets, some of them were in costumes.

They were having a great time. Now, I couldn’t follow the conversations I was eavesdropping on because I’m not into the universe as much as they are but it was very clear that they knew everything there was to know about this story, and all the various movies and the actors in and the writers and how it differed from or was the same as the comics, the story in the comics and all that good stuff. I’m in that environment looking at these people and listening to these people and this is right after I come across this article from the Brazilian writer who was trying to game the system.

I thought, all right, as a writer, I’m looking to develop readers who are like the fans of these movies who are fans of the story of the world, who appreciate the hard work and the craft that has gone into the creation of all this. Because it’s a lot of money but it’s also a lot of creativity and a lot of hard work by the writers and directors and actors and so forth.

That led me to come home and pickup Tribes. Seth Godin’s book and I know you really like this book and I’m going through it again, even though I’ve already read it a few times but each time I go through it, I pick up more information that I didn’t absorb the first time or the last time.

He says that tribes are a movement that they’re about change and that a tribe needs two things. A shared interest and a way to communicate. For me, the shared interest would be people who are interested in stories by, for and about women. A way to communicate, this is going to take me a while to build over time because the only communication I have right now is what Seth Godin calls permission marketing because it’s sort of out to me in form of an email twice a month.

Then back from my subscribers to me. It’s sort of only me talking to one person at a time where as in a tribe, it would be more like, for argument’s sake, a Facebook group where everyone can come together, talk to me, yes, but also talk amongst themselves.

[0:18:50.4] TG: Right, yeah.

[0:18:51.9] VF: I don’t have the ability yet to build something like a Facebook group because I don’t have the time for it yet and I can’t commit to it yet. But is that something like other than something like a Facebook group or a book club or these fan types of pages like you know Harry Potter had all kinds of fan sites pop up. I know Neil Gaiman fans have all kinds of places that they have created themselves where they can get together and talk. How can writers of fiction create these spaces for fans to gather and talk and interact?

[0:19:33.8] TG: Yeah, so there is a couple of things here. One is you have to have a kind of critical mass because – so I went to see Endgame this weekend and the theater is full but I would guess that like – okay, here is a good example. At the end of every Marvel movie is at least one extra scene, right? So you have to wait through. It is either you wait through half the credits get one scene, wait through the rest of the credits to get another or you wait through all the credits and get a scene.

So pre Endgame, so all the other 21 movies in the Marvel Universe, you could tell who the fans were by who got up when the movie was over, right? So I actually said it once, I forget after which movie because the movie ended. It was packed and two thirds of the people stood up as soon as it was over and started leaving. I was like, “Have these people never seen a Marvel movie?” right? So you could divide, I mean this is just a very crude illustration but I was at a different level of fandom than the two thirds of the people that got up and left.

Now in that extra third that was there, you probably had people like what you were describing that dressed up, had read the comic books, argued over the different timelines in the comic books. That is beyond what I am into, right? I am into the movies and a little more but I have never dove in and read all the comic books. So what you find is there is always a percentage of people that are going to really get into something and you need to have a big enough crowd that that percentage has some steam behind it, right?

Like a friend of mine posted a link to a Twitter thread of a bunch of Taylor Swift fans figuring out the best way to listen to her new single on all the different platforms multiple times to try to make the song the number one hit of the week, right? And my friend was like, “Oh to have fans like this one day” right?

[0:21:48.7] VF: Right.

[0:21:49.6] TG: Now the vast majority, so you have first you can divide the world into people that listen to Taylor Swift music and people that don’t, and people that listen to Taylor Swift music, a percentage of those that would go to a concert is much smaller. A percentage of those that have listened to every song would know every song is even smaller. The percentage that would actively recruit people to listen to the song on repeat all day 24 hours a day to help the song get to the number one spot is a whole other group of people.

So what I think is important early on where you’re at is you are not a place, if you think about Neil Gaiman, has lots and lots of titles. He is in a genre that is more apt for people to become fans, the fantasy, those kind of fans and he has a huge following. So I like Neil Gaiman. I have read a couple of his books but I am not like trying to connect with other Neil Gaiman fans you know? So all of that to say is the way that I have seen it work out in the world is you need enough people that the percentage that want to interact can’t there is enough of that, you know what I mean?

Then from there, I can do some things to encourage the interaction and you can do that now. We can talk about some of those but I think the important thing to remember is what everything that you just described of like the Neil Gaiman fans, the Marvel fans, my thing of Taylor Swift, the Taylor Swift fans, none of that is organized or had anything to do like the author or person in charge of that was not organizing any of that, right?

Marvel was not encouraging their fans to dress up and go to theaters, you know what I mean? Taylor Swift was not encouraging her fans to listen to her song on repeat to get the number one spot. It was very intrinsically organically motivated.

[0:23:52.8] VF: Right, exactly but that is the type of fan base that I think any creative is trying to develop. I don’t care what Neil Gaiman is putting out, I am going to get it, right? Whatever book Ian Rankin puts out I am going to get it. The same with J.K. Rowling you know there is a bunch of authors like that. I buy it and then I wonder what it’s about. Now, when talking about these examples. We are talking about people who have been doing it for 20 or 30 years, right?

So we are seeing what it looks like when it is fully developed. What I am trying to do is walk backwards from that and say, “Okay from where I am, if I am going to get there in 20 or 30 years, what do I have to do now? Where do I start? How do I start?” to other than the obvious things like making sure every book that I put out is the best one that I can write and those are a given. What else could I do?

[0:24:45.7] TG: Right, so I was going to start with the cliché answer, write the best book, right? So from there, there’s some things I think you can do. So one is you could start encouraging your audience to talk to you. So in your monthly emails about the book club, ask them to tell you what their favorite books are, right? Or when you do the author update, put a little PS and say, “Hey are you reading such and such book from the book club? I would love to know what you think. Just hit reply and email me back.”

[0:25:21.3] VF: Okay.

[0:25:22.8] TG: So start encouraging them to talk to you. I think that is a good place to start because the more that you can interact with your fans, the more you create long term fans. If you’ve ever paid attention to the way you feel about like a musician or an author before meeting them in person or seeing them in person and after meeting them or seeing them in person is totally different, right? If I am a fan and then I go see the person in concert, I walk away even a bigger fan you know?

So I think anything you can do to start interacting with people now when the fan base is low enough that you can keep up with one-on-one communication, getting them to email you back anything, ask them any questions, get them to interact with you in anyway and then reply to all of them even if it is like, “Thanks so much” you know? The other thing that you can do is start collecting their responses and sharing them with the community.

[0:26:21.5] VF: Oh.

[0:26:22.6] TG: Like last month, we read such and such book. I had five people tell me what their favorite part of the book and here is what they said. And it is from Anne of Maryland and Terry from Toronto and whatever and you start facilitating that kind of content back and forth.

[0:26:41.7] VF: Okay, I hadn’t thought of that one. All right, I can do that.

[0:26:45.5] TG: So then they’re kind of talking to each other not directly. It is through you but you are showing that there is discussions around what you’re doing, you know what I mean? And then down the road if you feel like the interest your book club is getting big enough, maybe you could start a Facebook group or Slack channel or something where you are actually having a discussion group around the book. So you are building a book club so you could interact.

And then I think the one thing that more authors could do is get their people together in person. So this is what I did and well I am going to do it again next month is every time I go to a conference where I think more than five people know who I am I host a meet-up and I get anybody that is a fan of mine or connected to me in any way to come to a place where I buy their first drink or whatever. So that I can meet them all in person and they can now they are –

We are all in the same room for the same reason, which is me. Yeah that sounds horrible but it allows the discussion to be centered around – I don’t have a discussion plan that everybody’s got to keep up with but it allows the discussion to be centered around book marketing and what my work is and it allows them to start doing what he describes in tribes, which is feeding off of each other basically.

[0:28:28.3] VF: Okay, just a follow up question to that. when you were talking about in my emails out to people, ask them to hit reply and tell me what their favorite part of the book was and so on, is it best to have just one call to action, just email me back as oppose to “you can reply to me, reply to this email or contact me on Twitter or here is my Facebook page” or whatever. Just have them do one thing, is that better or is it better to give them options?

[0:29:01.1] TG: So honestly I don’t know. I have only always had them. So when I’ve asked people to put stuff on social media it is so that they will share with their friends and family. I always look at their email and all they have to do is reply to the email to send me a message. So I always ask them to do that because it is the easiest thing, but you could test something else out. What I am trying to get when I do that is I want them to feel like they can talk to me.

And so when they reply to me and it comes straight to my inbox where only I see it and then I reply back and just say, “Thanks for the message” or “I really like that part too” or whatever, they have now interacted one on one in a private space, which to me is more meaningful than a public space, which maybe because I am old but I think that’s how I have always done it. I wouldn’t say I have tested that enough to know like, “No that’s the way you should do it.” I think whatever you want to do give it a try. You know the goal is to build up some personal interactions with my fans. Especially when you are at this level where, if a lot of people respond, is not overwhelming.

[0:30:15.0] VF: Right and I do reply to emails still. You know I am getting lots, but I am not getting so many that it is overwhelming.

[0:30:23.8] TG: Yeah, so looking for ways to for you to interact with your fan base and then as your fan base grows, look for ways to let them interact with each other both online but even better in person is really important. This is why with Story Grid, we decided to do the monthly conference thing because we know if we can get a couple hundred people in the same room, their love and loyalty to Story Grid is only going to grow because they are going to interact with each other over and we are the ones who brought them together.

But we couldn’t have done that three and a half years ago when we started because we didn’t have a big enough fan base to support people coming across the country to hang out with us for a couple of days.

[0:31:11.4] VF: Right, an annual conference not a monthly one.

[0:31:14.3] TG: Did I say monthly? God, yeah annually.

[0:31:17.1] VF: Before we get emails.

[0:31:18.1] TG: Yeah, sorry. Yeah so that is the thing and I mean I have even worked with clients that provided the infrastructure for their fans to set up monthly meetings in their town around the topic. So I work for Scott Densmoore who has passed away unfortunately a couple of years ago but he ran this thing called Live your Legend and he had this huge following and I helped him built out the infrastructure so that if you lived in the middle of nowhere Wyoming.

You could set up a Live your Legend monthly meet up and it would go on the website so that anybody else within driving distance knew Friday at 6 AM there is a Live your Legend meet up in the middle of nowhere Wyoming at the Barnes & Noble you know? And he did that because he knew the more people that got together around his flag, the more their loyalty and excitement about what he was doing grew but again, it is a chicken-egg thing right?

So I think it’s focused on building up your following and then as it is starts reaching a certain size start giving them opportunities to show up in person and start giving them opportunities to talk to each other and I think that starts accomplishing some of those things, but it is hard because when you read something like Tribes a lot of the examples he gives are these people that have huge followings existing and so you got to make sure like you can’t do that if you have a 100 people on your email list and you are getting an open rate of 40% because now you’re playing around with you know, one of the 40 is that interested.

[0:33:06.8] VF: Right. But everyone starts somewhere.

[0:33:09.5] TG: Right. I think it’s one of those, you start small with getting them to talk to you. Then, you kind of as they talk to you more and more, start kind of sharing what people are sharing with you. Then, as it grows from there, you start putting them maybe in an online form where anybody in the world.

And then as it grows from there, it’s like okay, well I’ve gotten enough people based in North America that I could probably get 50 of them to show up for a weekend somewhere, you know what I mean? Okay, now I’m going to do that. I’ve found and again, I pulled this from my clients, they would just do this around conferences. If they were going to a conference, they would let people know I’m going to be at this conference, they would let people know I’m going to be at this conference so if you’re you know, live in the city.

Or are attending this conference and know who I am, you should come. Right?

[0:34:00.9] VF: Piggy back off of an event that already exists.

[0:34:03.9] TG: Yeah, I’m doing this at the Craf + Commerce Conference. And then me and Jeff do one every year at the World Domination Summit in Portland and Rachel is putting together like a meetup of Story Grid people while I’m in town in Portland as well.

[0:34:19.8] VF: Cool.

[0:34:21.3] TG: Yeah, it’s that kind of stuff that is really fun and it’s also like you know, I am not very community driven so I tend to not do anything. I’ve seen it work really well for people who are community driven too. I just tend not to think about it but yeah. Is that helpful at all?

[0:34:43.6] VF: Absolutely. Well, it gives me some actionable steps that I can start working on now. I mean, all of this is long-term stuff, right? This is a long tail business, it’s consistency over time but it’s knowing what to do now and being strategic about the activities that I’m going to go engage in.

So that I’m not just throwing spaghetti at a wall which is what I was doing a year and a half ago, right? Now I have some actionable items that are strategic, that can get me to where I want to go over time.

[0:35:15.0] TG: Yeah, you know, another thing that you could do that’s kind of a mix of this is like if you’re going to a conference or you’re going to be somewhere like hosting a meetup of like people that love women’s fiction or whatever. Everybody that comes, you hand them a copy of the first book in your series.

[0:35:35.2] VF: Yeah, okay.

[0:35:36.7] TG: Right? You’re doing a mix of things. One, you’re focusing on your personas, you’re getting them to a place where you can talk to them and meet them and then you give them a copy of your book. If they read it and like it, they have already met you and they’re more likely to be a fan or yours because they met you in person.

You’re hosting the meetup around something that you all care about which is women’s fiction. It’s not as good as people dressing up as your characters and doing immediate meetup for your book but it is a stepping stone towards that.

[0:36:09.1] VF: All right, I like those, stepping stones towards my ultimate goal, works for me.

[0:36:13.7] TG: That’s right. That’s world domination.

[0:36:17.0] VF: Thank you, Tim.

[0:36:18.1] TG: Yup.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:34:26.9] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you

[END]

Welcome to another episode of the Book Launch Show! This week Tim and Valerie get into the details of numbers and book sales. In the publishing industry you frequently hear about these very specific numbers when it comes to your audience reading or buying your book: 10, 1000, 10,000. Today we discuss what these numbers mean and what they will show and teach you about where you’re at in the marketing process. It is important to remember that selling a book requires a great deal of patience, because this is mostly a slow moving marketing space and you often have to wait a while before you get meaningful results. So if you want to know where these numbers come from and why you need to pay careful attention to them, be sure to join us for this one!

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why selling 1000 copies of your book is your first big breakthrough and what it proves.
• The number of sales required for word of mouth advertising to start being really effective.
• How books are different from other media in terms of their marketing pace and longevity.
• Why the time it takes you to reach certain numbers does not matter as much.
• The reason you need readers, not just buyers, and the problem with free books.
• The self-publishing boom that Kindle brought about and why it fizzled out.
• Timing and genre choice as key considerations for selling books today.
• Why it is necessary for upcoming authors to have basic marketing skills.
• Growing your email list as a productive marketing tool.
• Keeping track of your sales and download numbers on a regular basis.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

The One Thing on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/One-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-bestselling-ebook/dp/B00D3J2QKW/ref=sr

Your First 1000 Copies on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Your-First-Copies-Step-Step-ebook/dp/B00DMIWAIC

Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/

Jon Acuff — https://acuff.me/

11/22/63 on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/11-22-63-Stephen-King/dp/1501120603

Stephen King — https://www.stephenking.com/

Needful Things on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Needful-Things-Novel-Stephen-King/dp/1501143786

Book Launch Blueprint on Amazon — https://www.amazon.com/Book-Launch-Blueprint-Step-Step-ebook/dp/B019JMWGGK

Michael Bunker — https://michaelbunker.com/

Hugh Howey — http://www.hughhowey.com/

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. This is Tim Grahl and this week, Valerie and I talk about numbers and book sales. There’s these different numbers if you hang around book marketing or book publishing long enough that you’ll hear a lot, right? There is your first 10 readers, your first hundred readers, a thousand and then 10,000.

You know, my first book was titled Your First 1000 Copies. Valerie opens with basically asking me, where did these numbers come from and why are they important? We spend a lot of time talking about that and why they’re there and why they exist and where they’ve come from and it’s really good, you know?

As we kind of come to an episode, it becomes these markers of how you’re doing with book marketing and I think that’s really important because it can feel overwhelming, it can feel slow, book marketing in general is a long, slow slog that takes a while to see results.

You know, one of the things in a blog post that I wrote about recently is it just – it takes about a year for your book marketing efforts to really pay off and I tell a story about the book, The One Thing and how the author worked his ass of for a year before he really saw the numbers start turning around.

It’s a really great episode, I think you’ll enjoy it and I think it will be helpful for you to get a glimpse into where these numbers come from, why they’re important and how you can use those when you’re thinking about getting your own book out into the world. I also want to mention that a lot of you email me a lot about wanting some help with your book launch or your book marketing or building your platform.

I’m not doing that as much anymore and the reason is because I have trained a lot of really smart, really expert book marketing professionals that can help you with that stuff. If you go to booklaunch.com/coaching, there is a list of really smart, really savvy, certified book launch coaches. These are people that went through a ton of training, came to Nashville, spent a lot of time with me getting trained here in Nashville, continue their training and they’re really smart people, really savvy people that have experience and can help you with your book marketing and book launching.

If you were looking for some help with that, I would definitely go to booklaunch.com/coaching and check out them. You can either reach out to one of them or you can just shoot us a note and we will connect you with one that’s right for you. Thanks for looking at that and we’re going to go ahead and jump into this week’s episode that’s all about the numbers of book marketing.

[0:02:58.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the book launch podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:03:07.7] VF: Hey Tim, how are you?

[0:03:09.3] TG: I’m good, how are you?

[0:03:10.9] VF: I’m pretty good, thank you. I’m just about finished my Dracula analysis so I’m feeling pretty peppy.

[0:03:19.7] TG: Finishing that big project, I’m sure that feels good.

[0:03:22.2] VF: Yeah, next time, I’m picking a novella, I’m not picking a big behemoth. As I was working this week and I pulled out my copy of Your First 1000 Copies again. I had a question. Why a thousand copies? I can’t believe that I’ve not asked you this before. Because I’ve heard a couple of different variations.

When we did the love story workshop through Story Grid and Seth Godin came and spoke with us. He talked about 10 copies and he talked about a hundred copies. You talk about a thousand copies and I’ve heard Shawn Coyne talk about 10,000 copies. Why are these numbers magic and why are these the things that we need to go for?

[0:04:09.7] TG: I don’t remember what Seth said about 10 copies.

[0:04:12.8] VF: He was saying that, well, first of all, to give your book to 10 people and see if you just give part of it – part of your book, like the first chapter to 10 people and see if they ask for more.

[0:04:25.1] TG: Yes.

[0:04:25.7] VF: If they don’t, go back to the drawing board. If they do, you might be on to something.

[0:04:31.3] TG: Yes.

[0:04:31.7] VF: Then he said to see if you can get a hundred people interested in it. I think he was breaking it down to the smallest possible unit so as not to overwhelm us all completely.

[0:04:41.2] TG: Yeah. There’s some interesting numbers that pop up across the board. There’s this kind of round number of 250. What you see if you look at the data is that most books sell 250 copies in their first year. Whether they’re traditionally published or self-published. Everybody thinks the numbers will be different, they’re about the same.

The reason for that is we all know about 250 people or are connected to about 250 people. If we just kind of promote our book to the people we know, social media, friends, family, colleagues, you know, all that kind of stuff, you can usually sell about 250 copies of your book. What Seth was talking about is more on the front end of writing the book and creating kind of your first little, should I keep writing, is this interesting?

When I’m talking about is once the book is out. If you sell a thousand copies of your book, you’ve done something interesting which is you’ve gotten about 750 people that don’t know you to buy a copy of your book.

They are under no obligation whatsoever to buy a copy of your book and yet they did. What that means is you have figured something out and you’re doing something to convince strangers to buy your book. Because again, if I come out with a book and I just promote it to the people I’m directly connected to, kind of the easy people, I can get to about a couple of hundred copies and then it will fizzle out and you won’t be able to sell anymore and this is the people that you see posting on Facebook over and over about their book.

Because that’s where they got their initial sales but now that doesn’t work anymore because those people have either bought the book or decided not to buy the book. Where again, once you hit a thousand, you’ve done something, right? This is where you started going on podcast or you’ve spoken somewhere or you’ve gotten somebody to review your book or you’ve done something to break out of your initial sphere of influence.

That’s why a thousand copies is really important. Because if you can figure out how to sell a thousand copies, you have figured out how to get strangers to buy your book and now you just got to keep doing that in order to continue to grow. For me, what I’ve seen is it’s actually harder to sell your first thousand than to sell your next 9,000 because if you get to a thousand copies, you mostly just need to – even if you just keep doing whatever you were doing to build your audience or get in front of enough people to sell a thousand copies.

You just can keep doing that. Let’s say you get a book bob and you sell a thousand copies in one day. Then you just keep doing different forms of advertising and price promotions. You could probably get to 10,000 copies. I find that getting over that initial hump of getting 750 strangers to buy your book is often the hardest. Now, the number 10,000 is, it was one of those numbers that I heard several times in the publishing world of like, that’s – it’s weird.

I heard it in different places. One guy, I knew, in the Christian world, there is this – there’s this LifeWay Christian bookstores, it’s this chain of Christian bookstores that are across the country and they have their own publishing house. They’re one of the few publishing houses that actually own the audience that they’re selling their books to which is one of the things we’ve talked about before.

A friend of mine got basically hired to write this marriage book and when he got hired, they said, we will sell 10,000 copies of this book in the first year and they ended up selling like 10,100 copies. They knew exactly how many books they would be able to sell. That’s one way I found it but I’ve heard it several times where it’s like, if you get a traditional publishing deal, they want you to be able to sell at least 10,000 copies of your book.

Now, if you’ve got some huge advance, they’re expecting a whole lot more than that, but if you just get kind of the run of the mill publishing deal, that’s the number they’re looking for, they want you to hit 10,000 copies. I had never understood where that number came from or why it was important.

Until Shawn explained it to me and he does some kind of reductionist math and there’s 350 million people in the United States and here’s the percentage of those people that are readers and then here’s the percentage of those people and – but the basic idea is if you can get 10,000 people to read your book and give it a try. You will then find out if your book is going to make it or not.

If 10,000 people read it, that’s all you need to make the book keep selling without you ever doing anything. Now, if 10,000 people give it a try and they don’t really like it or wasn’t all that interesting, your book’s going to die. But, if you get 10,000 people to read it and give it a try, that’s all you need to start the word of mouth into it.

Your book will keep selling for a long time automatically. The interesting thing about books is they have a longer shelf life than the majority of the movies or music in general, they have a longer shelf life, they age better. But they also market slower.

The new Marvel movie’s about to come out and everybody’s going to go see it on opening weekend and then a year from now, nobody will be watching that movie. Where with books and most cases, unless it’s written by a celebrity or something, it starts out slow, builds over time and you really don’t see a lot of your marketing, doesn’t pay off for about a year.

Just takes a long time because what happens is, people buy your book and they – I mean, I’ve already had this happen where like, okay, one of the first people I gave my book to is Jon Acuff and it wasn’t till six months later that he read it and started posting about it because he liked it so much. It just took that long, right?

Because he’s you know, he’s a busy guy, he probably get sent books by everybody and so mine was just in a stack and it took a while to get down to my spot in the stack. That’s how books work. Your job is to get 10,000 people to give your book a try, to read your book. My goal would be to sell 10,000 copies. If you can pull that off. The book will probably keep selling long into the future, right? Like Your First 1,000 Copies.

I haven’t touched that book in six years, I have not actively promoted it in five and it just keeps, every day I sell copies of that book because I think of it like a rocket launch. If you stop promoting your book at 3,000 copies, it’s going to crash, no matter what happens. If only 3,000 people ever gave your book a try, it’s not enough to get it out of orbit, to really get it up. Now, once you get it up and now Shawn and Steve’s opinion.

Once you – your job is to get 10,000 people to read it and your job is done. At that point, it’s just up to the gods whether or not it keeps going out into the world. One of the great things about being published by them with my last book is they really don’t care.

They’re not like putting any pressure on me to promote the book or you know, it’s like, we launched it, we got a bunch of people to read it, now the book, you know, it’s like we pushed it out of the nest, it’s up to the book to fly on its own.

Well, I might try to keep promoting it and they’re like okay, fine, whatever, you know? That’s what those numbers are. I think your first job is to sell a thousand copies because then, you figure out some marketing, you figured out how to get strangers to buy your book.

Then your next job is to keep doing things until you get to 10,000 copies sold because now you’ve given your book a shot. Enough people have read it that if it resonates, it will keep selling on its own.

[0:13:18.3] VF: You said something in there, the 10,000 copies is the number that you need to start the word of mouth engine. I think that’s my favorite sentence ever. I like that idea, I really couldn’t wrap my head around that one. Now, here’s a question. That 10,000, is that within a particular timeframe, are you looking to launch with that many, you know, eventually or is that within a year, within the first couple of years, does it matter?

[0:13:53.6] TG: I don’t think it matters because like this morning, I just sold a copy of Stephen King’s 11/22/63, right, I was at Jiu Jitsu and the guy was like, asking me about my favorite – what are you reading right now? I’m like, I’m reading Needful Things by Stephen King. He’s like, “Yeah, I’ve never really read Stephen King”, and I said, “Okay, 11/22/63 is one of my favorite books ever, you should go buy copy.” He’s like “I’m going to buy one as soon as I get out of class.”

Well that book came out in 2011. I read it probably four or five years ago and now I just sold a copy, right? Book came out, let’s see him looking at it. Eight and a half years ago. Took me a few years to read it, then took me a lot of years to tell this guy about it. Now, he’s going to read it sometime in the next month and he might wait three more years to tell somebody about it.

That’s how book marketing works. I don’t’ think it matters. I think you could come out with a book, not do anything, 10 years later, start promoting it, sell 10,000 copies and now it will work. Unless you wrote about like I don’t know, the Trump presidency or something, right? Something that will – god help us, eventually end. You know, unless it’s some kind of timely thing that just won’t be interesting after a certain date like people that wrote books about the Y2K bug, it didn’t matter how many books they sold, after Y2K, nobody would ever buy that again.

Barring anything like that, but of course, you want to sell your book as fast as it can so I just ran a launch the book came out last week and we sold somewhere north of 10,000. Between the preorders and the first week of sales, we broke well over 10,000 copies in the first week. That’s great.

Most books don’t do that. For your first 1,000 copies, it took me a year to sell 10,000 copies, it will probably take me about a year to sell 10,000 copies of Running Down a Dream. I don’t think it matters, I’m more interested in – did you sell copies last week? Did you sell copies this week, are you going to sell copies next week?

Because what I see with a lot of people that do huge launches and they sell 10,000 copies of their book is they just stop after that. I’m more interested in like continuing to put the book out into the world, but I don’t think it matters because books just takes a long time to be promoted because they take a long time to read and you know, it just takes a long time to tell other people about the book.

You know about Your First 1,000 Copies and you’ve probably sold copies for me over the last several years but it’s like, you meet an author, you have a conversation, you should read this book. Well, I came out with that book in 2013. If somebody’s hearing about the book for the first time on this podcast and they go buy a copy that took me six years to sell them a copy of the book.

I feel like it’s always the long game with books because they just – that’s what I love about books is like, if they don’t work, if they don’t sell the first month, you know, of movie, if that sucker doesn’t hit the first month, it doesn’t matter, it goes in the trash bin, where books like last forever.

[0:17:24.5] VF: I can build, if I’m looking at Masquerade, the book that I have out now, I can build on the sales I’ve already made from that. I’m not really starting from scratch in terms of sales right now with this – now that I’m focused on actually doing outreach and promotion.

[0:17:43.8] TG: Yeah. I don’t think there’s – Yeah, for sure. I mean, you told me before we started recording that you’ve had people emailing you, wanting you to finish the series, that’s a good sign. I think yeah, because people ask me all the time like what if your book’s been out three years, can you run a launch again? I’m like “Yeah”, you know, sure.

There is no reason you can’t. You know I still get interviewed on podcasts where people want to talk to me about Your First 1,000 Copies and my other Book Launch Blueprint and so people listen to those and they go buy a copy because it is the first they have heard of it. So I look at just keep going until – like I tell an author you can stop once you have sold 10,000 copies, otherwise you should keep going.

[0:18:32.5] VF: So Masquerade right now is entirely digital. My plan is to in the fall come out of a print version, hardback and paperback. It doesn’t matter the format right? It is 10,000 together.

[0:18:47.0] TG: Yeah, so Shawn and Steve, they’re theory is you need 10,000 people to read your book. So they don’t think it matters if people buy it or not. What I found is people tend to not read books that they get for free unless outlying situations like I gave Jon Acuff a copy and because he is a friend of mine he read the book or I had sent a 100 copies to fans with the explicit direction of read the book and leave a review. Otherwise, when people get books for free they tend not to read them, in my opinion.

[0:19:22.5] VF: Right and we talked about this a couple of weeks ago and I heard the phrase Kindle stuffing one time and it’s exactly what it – like I completely understand what that is and I am guilty of it myself and it just sits there on your kindle and you forget about it because you haven’t invested anything whatsoever in it not even a quarter.

[0:19:40.4] TG: Right, yeah Michael Bunker, another author first used that and I was like, “Oh yeah that is a great term for it” because see that was huge. So when Kindles first came out, people probably like you and me bought them, right? I don’t know and you had this and it was kind of clunky and you were in the cutting edge, my first Kindle was a Kindle 2, right? So it is the second version of the kindle. So long time ago and there weren’t a lot of titles on it, right?

This is when they were still fighting with publishing and they were really expensive or just not available on the Kindle and then you had all these self-published authors coming onto the scenes and that is when serializing your novel became really popular like Hugh Howey was probably the first one really strongly successful with it and all of these people were coming out with books and so people like you and me started just buying anything.

Hey, it is 99 cents, what the hell? And we buy it, buy it, buy it but then it became as the market matured, we stopped doing that. We started buying books that we would actually read because we realized we have bought 50 books and read three of them and so early on this was this gold rush with self-publishing of literally all you had to do was come out with a book and it would start selling because all of these people had Kindles and there wasn’t a lot of options for books available.

And the idea of getting a book for 99 cents was just so tantalizing to us readers that have been paying at least eight or nine dollars for a book for their whole lives but then that kind of past and now people even if it is 99 cents they are not going to buy it unless they think they are going to read it because they went through that a while ago. So I like to sell books because to me it increases the likelihood that somebody is going to at least open that sucker up and try the first few pages, and that’s what Sean means.

He wants 10,000 people to give the book a try to actually try to start reading and it, because his belief is sometimes a book hits and sometimes it doesn’t. It could be a perfectly written book but maybe it is the wrong time for the book, right? Was that – The Great Gatsby, right? It didn’t hit for years and it was because what finally made it hit is the army bought like however many copies and sent them to everybody that was out in World War Two and that is when it finally gained traction.

But it had been out for years and years by that point. So you know Shawn and Steve believe strongly in the muse and that sometimes you write a book and the universe and your muse just don’t get along, you know? And then there’s books that like if we are talking about genre, I forgot like somebody wanted to write a book that was like I forgot. It was a mix of two genres that Shawn and I were talking about. He said it was the most commercially unviable book, like genre pick.

Just like if you write poetry you are probably not going to sell 100,000 copies of your poetry you know what I mean? It is just the wrong time and so there is certain genres that you know writing a Western right now is not going to work the way writing a thriller would just because. So you can write the best Western on the planet, it probably is not going to sell as well as a mediocre thriller, but my thing is if that you work hard on a book and you put it out into the world, try to get 10,000 people to buy that book.

Even for 99 cents and then you get to see and I believe that too many authors come out with their book, it doesn’t sell very well for the first month, they get really embarrassed so they start promoting it and then they never find out if book, they never give the book a chance. To me, it’s like you give birth to this thing, this baby, it doesn’t walk in the first month and you’re like, “Well this one is fucked up. I am just going to…” you know? That is what it feels like.

So many authors do that, cause I’m like, the amount of pain I go through to produce a book, I am going to do everything I can to make it work. I am not going to give up. It is fascinating to me that I see authors that work on a book for two years come out with it. It doesn’t sell well immediately and they just drop it and move on to writing the next book and it just breaks my heart you know? So that is kind of my thing, is like, if you don’t know how to sell a thousand copies you should first try to learn marketing well enough to sell a thousand copies.

Then at that point your goal is, how am I going to sell 10,000 copies? How am I going to take this thing I’ve built that sold the first thousand and get to the next 10?

[0:24:41.2] VF: But that includes – so, for Masquerade the first part is a free download from my site. They are not paying money for that one but they are paying an email address. So there is some sort of cost and they have to actually go proactively to my site to get it. So I am thinking that the likelihood of those people at least opening the book and giving it a try is pretty high because they have to actually work to get it.

So in that case, do the free downloads count as part of that 10,000 or in my mind totally separate them or am I splitting hairs?

[0:25:22.6] TG: Well yeah, I mean the 10,000 is just like, you want to make it to California and I say shoot for the Pacific ocean and you will probably hit it, you know what I mean? There is no magic. If you sell 9500 copies or you get 9500 readers it will probably work as well, you know? So it is more like I am just keeping a rough number in my head of what I pulled off. So let’s say you sell 7,000 and you give away 5,000 you know? Well that is like 12,000 but you know some of those were giveaways. So that rounds to about 10,000, like it is more like, get a really big pile of people to give it a shot.

[0:26:14.3] VF: Right, well this is why that cross promotion that I tried way back when did not work because it was a numbers game and people were focused on the 10,000 rather than the fact that it is 10,000 people who actually read the book, who actually open the cover and give it a try because that is what you are looking for. People who read this genre to try to your book and if it is good enough they’ll tell someone, right?

[0:26:40.9] TG: Yeah, well it is like these authors that band together and do box sets of 12 books to hit the USA Today list or something. It’s like well you know nobody is probably going to read your book. Let’s all be honest about what we are doing here, you know? You are gaming a system so you can call yourself an USA Today bestseller, which is fine. I am not passing a moral judgment on that. What I am saying is we both know nobody is going to read all 12 of those.

So I would say lying to yourself about this is not helpful, so what you are trying to do is can I honestly tell myself that 10,000 people have cracked the cover of this book and read the first page. If not, then I need to keep going, you see what I mean?

[0:27:36.5] VF: Yeah, absolutely and it is the thing that I like, well I like a lot of stuff about this, but one of the things that I like about this is that it gives you a target to shoot for. It gives me a target to shoot for. So rather than it just being this foggy concept of I’ve got to try and sell something to somebody somewhere somehow, when I have a goal insight I at least know the direction I am going in rather than just wondering around. So 10,000 books –

[0:28:09.2] TG: That’s why I harp so much on email list right? Part of it is the truth that an email list is the best way to get your audience’s attention and drive action. The other part is it cuts through all the bullshit of like if I Google right now book marketing, the first article underneath the ads it comes up is a 119 book marketing ideas that can help authors increase sales and there is so many things. I mean if you read the article it is even worse, because about a 112 of those are complete waste of time.

But the worst part of it is now you have a 119 things you are supposed to be doing. That is not helpful to anybody and so my thing is like have one goal, build an email list. Now that is your litmus test. If what you are doing is getting people on your email list, then you should do it. If what you are doing is not getting people on your email list, you probably shouldn’t do it. So that to me and so it is the same thing with these sales numbers.

There is no magic in selling a thousand copies. Your life is not, you are not going to wake up the day you sell your thousand copies and something has changed you know? But it is an indicator that you are going in the right direction. Again, continuing to use the road map thing, like if you are heading to California and you started in New York and you find yourself in Illinois that is an indicator that you are going in the correct direction, right? You still haven’t like – nothing has changed.

You are not where you want to be but you are on the path, where if you are six months in to quote marketing your book and you have only sold 200 copies, you are doing something wrong. So it doesn’t mean you are a bad person. It just means what you’re doing is not working, you need to find something else to do and so yeah, that is the kind of place I land with that.

[0:30:12.3] VF: All right, so I am shooting for 10,000 copies in readers hands. I can do that.

[0:30:15.8] TG: Yeah, how many would you say you have now?

[0:30:17.1] VF: Oh you asked me this before. I think it was something – when I looked at it before wasn’t it something like 1,600 and I haven’t looked since?

[0:30:25.1] TG: I don’t remember.

[0:30:27.1] VF: I am really bad at this. I don’t like to look and I need to get in the habit of doing this but I think it was around 1,600 when we started and then I would have to check to see how many others have been sold since then. So I am on the path. I just need to move further down it.

[0:30:46.8] TG: Okay, and then like, I mean one thing that you could do when you are ready to really get cranking is start keeping track on a weekly basis and how many books did I sell on the last week or how many new downloads did get have both numbers? And because it is like having a budget or it is like getting on the scale every day, right?

[0:31:15.6] VF: God forbid.

[0:31:17.8] TG: Yeah, I mean forcing yourself to do that is like I have to face this thing now every day. Like I work with a nutritionist and I have to report my daily weight to him. So the first thing I do in the morning is I get up and I use the restroom and then I get on the scale. It is exactly the same every morning and that forces me, like now when I go to eat something I’m like, “Well I am going to have to get on the scale in the morning and see the result of what I am doing right now.”

So you are cranking on this thing, I think you should be looking at your numbers every week. So when I came out with Your First 1000 Copies about four months in, I decided to start the 10,000 book challenge of trying to sell 10,000 copies in the first year my book was out and every week, I would send my sales figures to my email list. Now it is a little different because I was teaching book marketing so it was relevant people cared what I was selling as oppose to most people don’t.

But it was a way for me to hold myself accountable where each week I’m like, “Okay what am I going to do? Because in a week, I am going to send out an email and if it is three sales, that is embarrassing.” So I think if you are finishing the last book in the series, you have done 1,600, if we are talking again a year from now and you’ve only sold 3,000, something has gone wrong.

[0:32:54.1] VF: Yeah, most of those came in the beginning when I was actually doing things and then I stopped marketing because I was just wondering around and I focused on the craft. So most of those came in the beginning and then there was a big lull and when I say lull, I mean I flat line.

[0:33:13.3] TG: Yeah, I mean but that is what we’ve been trying to –

[0:33:15.4] VF: So now it is ramping back up, right?

[0:33:18.4] TG: Yeah but I think holding yourself to looking at we should start this spreadsheet where each week before we get on the podcast, you have to fill in how many downloads you’ve had and how many books you’ve sold, and it is a way to hold me accountable because what I am telling you and you are doing what I am telling you and those numbers aren’t going up there is a problem and I don’t want to do this in theory you know?

I want to do this for real. So I think it would be good when you kind of because you are finishing Dracula, you’ve been updating your website. You are finishing the last book, you are doing a lot of things in preparation, but this should turn into, “Hey look I am selling more books.”

[0:34:03.7] VF: Absolutely. I like to sell books because I like money. I am pro-money, let’s get more money.

[0:34:13.4] TG: Yeah.

[0:34:15.4] VF: All right, so that sounds like homework. I’ll get a spreadsheet set up and we’ll just start filling the puppy in.

[0:34:22.8] TG: All right, that sounds good.

[0:34:23.9] VF: Thank you, Tim.

[0:34:24.9] TG: All right, thanks Valerie.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:34:26.9] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

On this week’s episode, Tim and Valerie talk about a trap authors commonly fall into, not having a clear idea of the audience that they are trying to build. When working on projects with different audiences, it is easy to feel as though there will be a natural overlap, and that an audience of one project will enjoy another, but this is not always the case. This is why being clear about the audience and creating the personas for each project will help work reach those who will enjoy it the most. Valerie shares some of her issues around this, as she has several different projects at once. Finding focus and clarifying your intentions for the outcome of the project can help clarifying the marketing strategy, as Tim shares. This will then help streamline your workflow and allow you to dedicate time to what’s most important. To learn about this and much more, join us today!

Key Points From This Episode:

• What Valerie’s upcoming books are about.
• The power in separating audiences.
• Desired outcomes are important when deciding on a marketing strategy.
• The trap writers commonly fall into.
• How to create and leverage audience overlaps.
• Editors and publishers are often short sighted in their marketing strategies.
• Having an audience of writers does not help with selling fiction.
• Why having personas is so important.
• And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Joanna Penn’s website — https://www.thecreativepenn.com/

Joanna Penn’s author website — https://jfpenn.com/

Book Launch Show website — www.booklaunchshow.com

Book Launch website — www.booklaunch.com

[0:00:00.3] TG: Hello, this is Tim Grahl, you are listening to another episode of the Book Launch Show. This week I felt like as Valerie and I talked, it was a little convoluted for a lot of it. Sometimes I feel like when I’m talking about these things, I’m not overly clear. It takes me a while to get clear on what I’m trying to say. But I think it’s a common trap that we can all fall into.

I think we fall into it because of our own ego sometimes, I think we fall into it because we just get distracted by new shiny objects, it’s always much more fun to start something new than actually follow through on something you’ve been working on for a long time. Also, we can just honestly get confused about what we’re doing.

The thing that we’re talking about this week, what it really comes down to is understanding the audience that you are trying to build. Making sure you’re extremely clear on who that is and making sure that all of your actions are focused on that thing. The kind of temptation for going off in a different direction came at Valerie, sideways this week, it came out in a very natural way that if you’re listening to this and you’ve written a book, I think it would catch you off-guard too.

Because at one point, I tell Valerie that she should not in any way market a book that she has written. Now, I don’t say those words very often but when I do, I have a really good reason for it. It’s a really important episode. Halfway through it, I’m like, this is not going to make any sense, nobody should ever listen to whatever I’m saying right now.

But by the end, I realized, what we’re talking about is a very complicated issue, that is a trap for a lot of authors so I think it’s really important to talk about. We have a really good discussion about it. I think we land in a really good place and I think it’s a really helpful episode.

For those of you listening, if you have never kind of gone through anything that I’ve taught or written, you might be lost if you’re dropping into the middle of this podcast or even if you’ve listened to a lot of it. I would recommend you go out and you buy two different books, it’s the first two books I wrote, it’s Your First 1000 Copies. That’s the basis of the kind of marketing, author platform that I teach and then Book Launch Bluepring is the methodology I bring to launching bestselling books.

If you’re kind of stuck with your marketing, if you're listening to these episodes and you’re like, “god damn it, I wish they would just get to the point,” those books get to the point. We go really in depth on really kind of niche ideas and really small topics and really blow them apart on this podcast, but if you really just want an overview of how building an author platform works and launching a bestselling book, go pick up a copy of my book, it’s at Amazon, Your First 1000 Copies is the first book and Book Launch Blueprint is the second book.

Of course, you can just search my name, Tim Grahl, and find both of those. Definitely go check those out if you haven’t yet. Pick up a copy, buy one for a friend, an author friend of yours that is stuck as well. With that, we’re going to stop here and jump into the episode and get started with Valerie.

[0:03:18.9] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Book Lauch podcast. Helping authors launch and market their books.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:03:26.9] VF: Hello Tim, how are you doing?

[0:03:29.1] TG: Good, how are you Valerie?

[0:03:30.5] VF: I’m pretty good. I’ve been looking this week at what I’ve been doing so far in marketing and working with you. A lot of it was getting my ducks in a row at the beginning, that’s done. Now I’ve got a system, I’m getting the connection system is up and running.

A lot of it now is maintenance. Looking for new places to do outreach and reaching out to those podcasts or book clubs or what have you. While that’s going on in the background, I have something else I wanted to ask you about and it might take us a few podcasts to start to get through it all.

[0:04:09.2] TG: Okay.

[0:04:10.1] VF: I’m looking forward. Now, so I’m currently marketing The Love Story. That’s out, but I’m looking forward to future books and for example, I’ve got one coming out in October, this year, 2019.

[0:04:22.4] TG: Is this the thriller?

[0:04:24.6] VF: Well, this is the analysis of Dracula, the Story Grid analysis of Dracula and here is what I want to do. That one will come out this year, but the thriller that I’m working on stems from Dracula. It’s inspired by Dracula and that will come out in 2020.

What I actually want to start doing now is building interest, one for the book that comes out the fall, but then that will develop interest for the thriller that comes out the year following. Even thought his is an analysis of Dracula, which is a horror novel, it actually is of interest to wider groups of writers.

Horror writers, yes. Thriller writers? Anyone who is wondering why the force of antagonism is so important, why you have to come up with a great villain and writers who want to get a handle on point of view and understand why that is so important because Dracula is a master work for all of those things.

I know we talked about promoting me as a writer. The thing that I have to use as leverage is me as an editor and the writers that I would be targeting with the Dracula analysis are also thriller, writers who are thriller readers. I think there’s a connection to be made there because if I’m putting myself out there as someone who has analyzed Dracula. I have a certain level of expertise.

In this type of work, if I’m going to write a thriller now that is inspired by Bram Stoker but is sort of a Story Grid rewriting of Stoker’s work. Then I’m really going to have to prove that I know how to do my job, right? That I know how to use these Story Grid tools to create a really great novel.

I think even though with the analysis my primary target audience is writers, they’re going to be curious to see whether I can walk the talk, so they would be interested in looking at the novel when that comes out. Does that make sense?

[0:06:32.0] TG: Yeah.

[0:06:35.9] VF: How do I start – how and when I guess, do I start promoting the Dracula analysis and how do I catapult from that one to the thriller? How do you start promoting a book that’s not out yet, I guess is my question?

[0:06:51.9] TG: Okay. There is a couple of questions in there. Let’s talk first about the whole – those are two different audiences.

[0:06:59.9] VF: Okay.

[0:07:00.7] TG: There’s overlap, but there’s two different audiences. You’ll have to – I mean, we’ve talked about what we’ve talked about of like focusing on fiction, that kind of thing. But if you want to do kind of a campaign around the Dracula analysis book, then it will mean just shifting into that gear where it’s like “okay, I’m going to go after podcast for writers so that I can talk about my expertise as a horror author based on the Story Grid masterwork Dracula.”

You would do all the same things, but I would treat those as two different audiences and the best version of this that comes to mind is Joana Penn where she has her Penn, I forgot the name of her site, Penn writers or whatever.

[0:07:50.0] VF: thecreativepenn.com.

[0:07:52.2] TG: Yeah, thecreativepenn.com that is all about the business side and marketing side of writing and then she has her JF Penn website that is about her fiction and those – she’s building an email list of both, but they’re two separate email lists.

I think what you would do is I don’t know; we could talk about whether you need another website or just a section of your current site.

[0:08:15.8] VF: No.

[0:08:16.9] TG: Which is what I would lean towards is a section of your current site.

[0:08:21.0] VF: God no.

[0:08:22.8] TG: But like, or, we would have to talk about the best way to do this. But you would need a separate list of people that are interested of your analysis of Dracula. But then, you could promote to them, hey, I have this fiction over here, would you also like to be a part of that? And drag people over to that side.

When the thriller comes out, you could make a case of them of like “hey, you should buy this book so you can see what a Story Grid written book looks like. But that’s a harder sell. Because you could say that about any masterwork, you know what I mean?

[0:09:03.0] VF: No

[0:09:05.0] TG: If I’m a writer and I’m interested in learning about writing, I know that I can read any well written book by established author, both classic fiction and new fiction and get a glimpse into what good fiction is.

[0:09:19.5] VF: Okay.

[0:09:21.0] TG: I’m interested in this particular book because I’m going to learn something specific about writing.

[0:09:28.6] VF: Right, okay.

[0:09:31.3] TG: To leap from “hey, you’re interested in my book about writing to therefore you're going to be interested in my fiction,” is to me a very big leap, that you need to just invite people into and most of them won’t take you up on it.

But those are two separate audiences and I think you need to talk to them differently, you need to send them to different places, you need to sell different things, I mean, that’s just a totally different audience.

[0:09:59.9] VF: Okay, on my website, I already have a list for this. Signup list for this. Now, the page could use some improvement because it’s a page I created when I was doing the whole overhead, overhaul of my site and so there’s sort of a holder text there on some of it. I already have that in place and it’s one of the pages under the four writers tab. That’s already in place. One of the ideas that I had, because this is another list, I need another reason for people to sign up to it, right?

If they sign up to my main mailing list, my book club mailing list, well, they can download the first part of Masquerade for free and they’re joining my book club and all that good stuff. Since this is another list, I need another download, right? Another – what do you call it, a magnet, something for that list, do I not?

[0:10:54.1] TG: Yes, yeah. I would say you do.

[0:10:58.2] VF: I do have an idea that I’m still thinking through and it’s a video blog, a vlog that would be potentially a weekly vlog where I would, as I’m saying this, I’m wondering if this really is for the analysis or for the thriller or both. Anyway, I’ll tell you what it is and then you tell me what you think.

It would be a weekly vlog where I would talk about basically what I’m doing. The lessons that I’ve learned from Dracula, what I’m incorporate – since the thriller is a rewrite of Dracula, what I’m rewriting, how I’m using Story Grid as the drafting tool.

[0:11:38.9] TG: Okay. Why did you write the Story Grid guide or masterwork of Dracula? What are you hopping to get out of it?

[0:11:46.2] VF: Well, I wanted to study the novel, I wanted to study the story and the structure of the story to see what makes it tick.

[0:11:54.5] TG: Okay, great, that’s the internal reason to do it, but why go through all the extra effort and pain of writing it all out and publishing it.

[0:12:03.8] VF: It gives me a platform, it gives me a level of expertise, hopefully, some money.

[0:12:09.7] TG: Okay, this is what I’m getting to. It gives you a platform, a level or expertise so you can get money. How are you going to get that money? Are you going to speak, are you going to get hired to be an editor, you willing to – because you know, this book’s not going to sell 10,000 copies in the first month.

You’re not going to make money off of book sales. Where are you thinking you’re going to make money as a result of writing this?

[0:12:33.6] VF: Well, primarily, it was to develop the knowledge so that I could carry that knowledge over to my fiction.

[0:12:40.3] TG: Okay, if that is the only reason you did it, then you should not do any marketing for the book whatsoever.

[0:12:49.0] VF: I don’t know what to say to that.

[0:12:52.8] TG: Okay, this is the path, right? Okay, you wrote this book, mainly so it’s almost like an accomplishment, but if you don’t want the things that come at the end of marketing this book, because it’s not going to be money, these books, we know are not going to sell enormous amounts of copies. Because of the nature of the book itself. Let’s say you do sell 10,000 copies in the first year. That’s still not going to be a huge significant amount of money that you can quit your job and just do that, right?

[0:13:28.3] VF: Right, yeah.

[0:13:30.7] TG: Right, the only reason to market the book, this book, is to get something else out of it. You want to be known as a thriller/horror editor, that’s what our – it will grow your name so that you can get more clients or get speaking gigs at conferences for that or whatever.

But if you don’t want those things, there’s no reason to market the book. Because you’re not going to get a bunch of money of the book, the only way you make money off of the book is by doing these other things, but if you don’t want those things, you’re walking down a path that ends in a place you know you don’t want to be.

[0:14:12.8] VF: Okay.

[0:14:14.0] TG: You’re building an audience, then, for something you don’t want. You see what I’m saying?

[0:14:19.9] VF: Yeah. I think I’m still back on – you don’t see any cross over between the two audiences. Because what I’m looking for readers, I will have to go through the same exercise that I just went through for the love stories, who are my personas, where do they hang out? I think there’s cross over between the personas that I’ve already created because even though it’s a thriller, it’s still about a woman, it’s still a woman’s story in the way that The Girl on the Train is about a woman.

You know, that kind of vein. There’s definitely crossover in the personas that I’ve already created for the love story and for the thriller. Great. I think there are women who read thrillers who don’t necessarily read love stories. Who are they and where do they hang out?

[0:15:09.1] TG: Now, those are the right questions, but that has nothing, people that read thrillers don’t give a shit about an editor’s take on Dracula. How many of Joana Penn’s fiction books have you read?

[0:15:22.6] VF: A couple, I haven’t read them all, I read a couple.

[0:15:26.5] TG: I would say you’re in the minority of her nonfiction audience.

[0:15:31.1] VF: Yeah, she’s mentioned, I don’t want to put words in her mouth and I think she’s mentioned that there hasn’t been a huge crossover, but she’s doing something very different.

[0:15:39.9] TG: I’m telling you, teaching people about writing and talking to writers is a really bad way to sell fiction.

[0:15:47.9] VF: Yes.

[0:15:48.5] TG: Every writer falls into this trap because it’s an easy thing to build a platform on. I mean, I’ve ran into this. I mean, it’s not the same thing, but it’s like my audience that I built around book marketing is not interested in Running Down a Dream. They’re just not. Every time I do something with Running Down a Dream, it has the lowest conversion rates of anything else that I do around book marketing.

[0:16:14.8] VF: How do I start marketing the thriller? Is it too early, when does the long launch start, all that kind of stuff?

[0:16:24.4] TG: When are you planning on coming out with it?

[0:16:26.4] VF: Next year.

[0:16:28.5] TG: Ballpark, spring, summer, fall?

[0:16:30.2] VF: Well, I’m thinking October because it’s a Dracula related – it’s sort of a Halloween type book.

[0:16:35.6] TG: You're roughly a year and a half away from it coming out?

[0:16:38.4] VF: Yeah.

[0:16:38.7] TG: I wouldn’t start marketing it until you’re six to nine months out and even then, when it ramp up if you’d follow like my nine month plan for launching a book, all of it would be behind the scenes until the final month, anyway. So, I am saying if you want an audience to overlaps, continue building the audience you’re building now because they already read fiction and so getting them to read a – you would frame this new book that you know as a thriller, you would frame it as women’s fiction, that’s also a thriller.

[0:17:16.7] VF: Right, totally which is why in my book club, the types of stories that I am talking about each month, they’re not all love stories. They all feature a woman and some aspect of a woman’s story, but the readers don’t care, right? They are not thinking about genre the way I am thinking about genre. So, they don’t care how I classify it in my Story Grid head. They just want a great story that they can get lost in.

[0:17:43.6] TG: Right, so what I am telling you is all the stuff that you are doing now to build your audience for Masquerade is also setting you up to sell your thriller in a year and a half and I don’t think – if you tell me, “Tim this is the only thing I care about. I don’t want to do anything; my editing business is fine. I don’t need to do anything to grow that and I don’t want to be known in that way. I am going all in on fiction.” I would tell you; you should do zero external marketing for the Dracula master work.

Just let this story Grid Machine do it for you, do the work within Story Grid to talk about it or whatever, but do not go out in the world and become known because you are now splitting your time, you are splitting your audience. All the same reasons we decided you shouldn’t do that several months ago, you still should not do that.

[0:18:37.1] VF: Okay, so keep doing the outreach that I am working on.

[0:18:41.6] TG: Exactly, I feel like that is setting you more over to success, even if you are writing something completely different like a male led sci-fi novel, that’s an action. You know, I am trying to think of something opposite of what you are building. You are still building a better audience for that by building an audience of fiction readers then you are building an audience of writers.

[0:19:08.6] VF: So, unless I am trying to build my editing business, leave it alone.

[0:19:15.1] TG: Leave it alone. You just always have to think about what are you hoping to get. So, here is the thing, so okay I deal with this with authors a lot that are traditionally published. So, everybody in the process with this author, their agent in most cases. There’s some really good agents that think long term for their authors, but most agents, most editors, most publishers, they are only thinking about this book and they are actually only thinking about the first one to four weeks of sales in this book. That is all they care about.

So, the author gets stuck in this trap of doing all this other stuff based on the publisher and the editors, which are the same and the agents and the publicists too. If there is a publicist involved, they start only focusing on that first month. For most authors of business books, which is what I work with a lot, wrote a business book almost as like a long-term marketing plan. You know it is a new way to market their business.

So, they know they are not going to hit the New York Times list, they are not trying to do that. They really just want to get the book out into the world to bring in more business and establish themselves as an expert.

[0:20:31.4] VF: To use as a calling card.

[0:20:33.1] TG: Yeah, but because everybody else in this situation freaking out, you know you got to make the first week, first week, first week, you got to push, you got to push, you got to push. They start doing that when that is actually undercutting what they actually wrote the book for, right? So, it skews their priorities. So, you’ve worked hard on this book. It is coming out. You probably feel like one, “I have a book coming out therefore I promote it,” that is a normal thing.

You also probably feel some sort of like, “well, you know I should be helping Story Grid get the word out about this book.” You feel these pulls but you have to understand what you are going to get at the end of that. What you are going to get at the end of that is a bunch of stuff you don’t actually want, which is to be known in this space as an editor, more clients known as a nonfiction author not a fiction author because again, it is really hard to split your time between two things.

So, if you don’t want the things that are at the end of promoting this book, you should not be promoting the book. If you really truly just wrote it as an exercise, then just put it out into the world and let it go and again, I can’t express enough that you building up a following of writers will not self-fiction, it just doesn’t. I’ve just seen it too many times.

[0:21:57.8] VF: Okay.

[0:21:58.8] TG: You do not like this answer?

[0:22:00.9] VF: No, I believe you. I don’t think you’re telling me; I don’t think you are lying to me or anything like that. It just wasn’t the answer I wanted but that doesn’t mean –

[0:22:09.2] TG: Well that is what I meant like why don’t you like the answer because to me, I am letting you off the hook.

[0:22:15.5] VF: You are, you are totally letting me off the hook, which is a bit of a shock.

[0:22:19.6] TG: I know, why are you fighting me so hard on letting me off the hook?

[0:22:23.7] VF: I would just really love to have this as a way to create interest in the thriller. Is there something I can do with it? Well I can talk about it, talk about it in reference to the thriller that is coming out. I mean I can do that.

[0:22:41.8] TG: Here is how you answer this question, find some ideal readers for the thriller. So do a little bit, don’t do the whole spreadsheet like you did before but just do a little bit of thinking. Okay, who is a good person for the thriller that will come out in a year and a half? Get them on the phone and tell them about the Dracula project and then start seeing if they are interested. It would even be better if you could do it in person because you know, it’s like when I try to talk to somebody about jujitsu.

And I immediately see their face go blank and I’m like, “I should stop, they’re not interested.” Right? You know that. See if you can get them interested. Try a lot, try some different angles of talking about it, but the thing is like the typical fiction reader does not give two shits why the fiction book works. They just want to read a book that they enjoy and they don’t know why they enjoy it. They don’t care why they enjoy it. They just know that they loved it or they know that they hated it.

[0:23:48.4] VF: Right that is not their job to know why it works or doesn’t work. That is our job.

[0:23:53.7] TG: Yeah, a book dissecting a novel I cannot – I have trouble coming up with an angle that a typical fiction writer would be interested in. Again, when I say I want to be clear here, I am not saying there is no overlap. I am saying it is very low overlap. Again, coming back, when I send out an email promoting my book, it is not like nobody buys it, but it is a very low number of people buy it compared to when I talk about anything having to do with marketing because that is the audience I built.

So, what I am telling you is that if you build an audience of writers who are interested in learning about writing, when the times comes for them to buy your thriller novel, a really small percentage of them. if you did that same amount of work to build an audience of fiction readers, that would convert better.

[0:24:43.2] VF: Okay.

[0:24:44.9] TG: So, if you can buy coffee for three different people that are big readers and find something that got them interested, like you tell them a little bit about the book and see if they ask you any questions. See if that sparks any kind of interest and if you can find an angle maybe there is something there. I can’t think of anything.

[0:25:04.4] VF: Maybe that is the trick, right? Find the angle, if there is one.

[0:25:08.4] TG: That is what I’m saying. I mean we have proven that I don’t always like when we get really specific what I think is not necessarily the right thing. Like when we are talking about your author updates. So, I am having a lot of trouble. So, I am basing my opinion on two things. One, my anecdotal experience working with authors that have tried to build an audience of writers and then sell them fiction and it just doesn’t work.

And then my view of I can’t come up with an angle that a typical fiction reader would actually be interested in. So, you need a fiction reader that reads somewhere in the ballpark of what you are writing that is not a writer and is not interested in becoming a writer. And then if you can get them interested in what you are doing with Dracula, you’ve got to be like the angle. You need an angle and you can’t be interested because they like Valerie and they want to hear about what she’s working on.

There is a difference between that and this is – I just don’t see how you convert. I am interested in dissecting every scene of Dracula to I want to really read your fiction.

[0:26:23.4] VF: I think it is the findings that I came up with from Dracula. I think that might be, because there is a woman story in Dracula that is there, but no one sees it. So, I think if I just on the fly that is as much as I can come up with, but if I give that some thought if there is a hook, if there is an angle, if there is a spark there that I can interest people with that might be it. If I could flesh that out.

[0:26:51.0] TG: Yeah and I think that would make that great fodder for your fiction audience say, “hey I have been working on this thing over here. You probably won’t be interested in reading it, but here is some stuff that I learned that I think you’ll like.”

[0:27:05.2] VF: The Dracula analysis, I wouldn’t expect them to buy that because that is a total story nerd thing that I am all over and the other editors are all over because we just eat this stuff up and storytellers would be interested in this right? Anyone who is looking to develop their craft because that’s a craft thing, but we just said, the readers don’t care. They just want a book that works.

[0:27:30.1] TG: Exactly.

[0:27:31.0] VF: Unless they decide that they want to write a book someday and then they move over to the other group of people anyhow.

[0:27:36.2] TG: Yeah.

[0:27:37.4] VF: So, no, I wouldn’t expect them to be interested in what the turning point of a scene is. But the fact that this is why I said that the people who would be interested in it would be people who want to know why point of view is so important is because it is actually written from a woman’s point of view.

[0:27:53.9] TG: But let’s say I read Dracula and loved it I would never even cross my mind to care what the point of view was, unless I am somebody who is interested in storytelling.

[0:28:07.1] VF: Unless you are interested in the way women are represented in the book and the women’s stories that are told in the book.

[0:28:14.4] TG: You are still – that is the angle that will get your women’s audience. That is great information for your women audience. That still doesn’t answer how. So maybe it should be the opposite of like I am still saying, let us say you build up a list of a thousand writers that loved your analysis of Dracula, even love the women’s angle on it. That does not necessarily mean that any of them are going to be interested in reading your fiction.

[0:28:44.8] VF: No, I mean talking about the women’s angle and Dracula to my fiction readers.

[0:28:49.1] TG: Yeah that’s great. Absolutely, but that is not marketing the Dracula book.

[0:28:55.4] VF: No but it is leveraging the Dracula book to start to generate some sort of curiosity about the thriller, right?

[0:29:04.0] TG: Yes, I agree but I feel like we are talking around the same thing. You are still trying to attract fiction readers. You are not trying to attract writers.

[0:29:14.1] VF: Right, I just wanted to figure out how I could leverage this for that.

[0:29:19.4] TG: Right. So, you can leverage almost anything. You are leveraging your everyday life by writing your monthly author updates. This is why the personas are so important. What I was trying to convince you was to not try to add in writers as a persona.

[0:29:34.6] VF: Oh, I see, okay.

[0:29:35.9] TG: Right, you keep the same persona and then just twist everything you do to talk to those personas.

[0:29:43.9] VF: Okay. That’s what I am looking for. That is what I have to do.

[0:29:47.2] TG: Yeah, like the only way I have been able to talk about Running Down a Dream to my audience is to twist it to be about book marketing.

[0:29:55.7] VF: Okay.

[0:29:57.2] TG: Yeah, like I have to have a book marketing angle or they are just not interested because that is what they signed up for. I could go down a whole other path. I just don’t want you to get tantalized by, “okay I am going to go out and get on a bunch of writers podcasts and talk about this book and build an audience and hopefully some of those people will be interested in my fiction.” That is a loser’s game. The winner’s game is I got my personas and I am going after them and I am going to talk everything I do.

I could turn my trip to Whole Foods into a whole blog post about marketing, right? I have my personas locked in and I could take anything I do like my view is that everything is marketing. So, I could write anything, I could take anything that happened to me and twist it into learning about marketing because I want to talk to my persona. So sure, take this book and twist it into being about women and fiction and that’s great content, but it’s for the same people.

[0:31:02.8] VF: Tim? Are you starting to feel like a broken record?

[0:31:08.7] TG: Well I often feel like I say things over and over anyway. So, like you know because you are like on this podcast. You are playing as the stand in for all of the listeners and I think this is a really easy trap for people to get into, which is, “oh here is this group over here that would be easier to talk to and find. I am going to talk to them and start building them up as my audience.” But they’re not going to be interested in the actual books that you are trying to write and sell.

Does that make sense? Because I feel like I talked around a lot, but I don’t know if I ever actually brought it home.

[0:31:46.0] VF: Yes, and I think we needed to talk around it to figure out one, if it could be leveraged in anyway and two, if so, how right? So that is good.

[0:31:57.6] TG: Okay.

[0:31:58.2] VF: Good, awesome. Okay I will let you go now.

[0:32:01.6] TG: All right.

[0:32:02.2] VF: Well, see you next week Tim. Thank you so much.

[0:32:04.2] TG: Thanks Valerie.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:32:05.2] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the shownotes or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website, booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you’d like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

[END]

What exactly is a blurb? On the episode today we hash out the meaning of a blurb: is it the commentary from another author about your book or the advertising copy for the back cover? Either way, we discuss the value of a blurb and size up the actual role it plays in book sales, and then we dive into what it should ideally look like. Getting serious about asking for a write-up, we talk about what you would more than likely have to do to get a “yes” from a well-known author, pointing out the many years of building relationships and helping out that often precedes the much-desired “yes” response. Of course you might get a positive answer from doing a random, cold ask, but let’s face it, the odds aren’t great. It is so crucial for us authors to keep networking, so tune in today to find out the what, the why and the how of leveraging your connections for blurb gains.

Key Points From This Episode:

• The different approaches to writing a blurb for fiction versus non-fiction books.
• What a fiction blurb should and should not be and what the main objective is.
• Why it’s so difficult for authors to write blurbs about their own books.
• How to avoid giving spoilers when writing blurbs for a series.
• Testing reader response to sales pages and why it’s not really a worthwhile endeavor.
• How blurbs and write-ups from reputable sources can indirectly benefit you.
• The advantage of traditional publishing and the privileged access it automatically gains you.
• Creating and leveraging key connections who can later be approached for a blurb.
• Advice about asking an author to write a testimonial of your book.
• The importance of building relationships in the publishing industry.
• What it takes for influencers to respond to an ask and perhaps agree to it.
• The need for writers to be purposeful about networking and embracing these opportunities.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Tim Grahl — https://booklaunch.com/

Tim on Twitter — https://twitter.com/timgrahl

Valerie Francis — https://valeriefrancis.ca/

Valerie on Twitter — https://twitter.com/valerie_francis

The Story Grid Editor Roundtable Podcast — https://valeriefrancis.ca/podcast/

Running Down a Dream — https://www.amazon.com/Running-Down-Dream-Winning-Creative/dp/1936891557

Masquerade Series —

Steven Pressfield — https://stevenpressfield.com/

Ryan Holiday — https://ryanholiday.net/

Shawn Coyne — https://storygrid.com/about/

The Punisher —  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5675620/

Seth Godin — https://www.sethgodin.com/

Ramit Sethi — https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/

Barbara Corcoran — http://www.barbaracorcoran.com/

Shark Tank — https://abc.go.com/shows/shark-tank/about-the-show

Zig Ziglar — https://www.ziglar.com/

Michael Hyatt — https://michaelhyatt.com/

Craft + Commerce — https://conference.convertkit.com/

Nathan Barry on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbarry

[0:00:00.5] TG: Hello and welcome to the Book Launch Show. My name is Tim Grahl and this week Valerie and I start looking at, well actually it was a little confusing at first. This may be is a, maybe it's something, lots of writers called different things or maybe it's a Canadian–American thing, but I thought we were talking about the quotes the other authors give you to put it on the cover of your book. I call those blurbs. Valerie was talking about the advertisement copy for like the back cover or Amazon, which that's what she calls blurbs.

So anyway, we ended up talking about both things after the confusion was fixed, but I mean it's an interesting topic. It's something that we all have to deal with. It's one of those things that whenever your book's being published and especially when you're self-publishing and all of this is 100% up to you, you've got to write this marketing copy for your book and it's really hard because one is if you're writing fiction, it's just a little harder, I think to write straight marketing copy for fiction than nonfiction.

The other is, you're writing about your own book and you're trying to encapsulate into just, you know, a few paragraphs why people should read your book and catching their interest enough. And then on the other hand, if you're talking about getting other authors to give he quotes for the cover of your book, that's a whole other animal that you've got to go after and figure out on your own as well. So we ended up talking about both of these. Both of these things are those, like when you're publishing your book, it's like a checkmark item. It's not the biggest deal. It's one of many things you have to do to publish your book.

But then at the same time, both of them can be overwhelming in their own rights. So we spend this episode talking about those things and working through them and helping Valerie and hopefully by extension you understand how to think through these things and accomplished them.

So let's jump in and go ahead and get started.

[INTRO]

[0:02:04.0] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Book Launch Podcast, helping authors launch and market their books.

[EPISODE]

[0:02:04.0] VF: Hey, Tim. How are you today?

[0:02:12.0] TG: Doing fine, Valerie. Yourself?

[0:02:14.0] VF: I’m good, I'm good. Spring has sprung in my part of the world. It makes me very happy. Does that mean it's gotten above freezing? It was 20 degrees the other day, Celsius, which is a beautiful, beautiful spring day.

[0:02:27.0] TG: Oh, I see it now I have to like Google.

[0:02:30.0] VF: I don’t know what that is in Fahrenheit. No clue. 

[0:02:34.0] TG: Well that's 68 that's, that's what it is here in Nashville.

[0:02:37.0] VF: Oh no, it's, you know, freezing today. But it was warm the other day. I'll take it. Okay. Before we talk about anything else, we've got to talk about back cover blurbs.

[0:02:53.0] TG: You’ve been threatening me with this for a couple of weeks.

[0:02:56.0] VF: I know, and we never seem to get to it. So we're not going to about homework or any of that kind of stuff until we get into it because otherwise we're gonna lose another half hour.

[0:03:04.0] TG: No, that's fine.

[0:03:05.0] VF: So here's the problem I'm having, or here's the situation I have. We'll just deal with Masquerade. So it's this a novel in 12 parts and I started the series with a series overview and that's the one I have on my website that sort of, it tells people basically what the story is about. But because it's in 12 parts, that means that there are 12 different items on say, Amazon, 12 different books and right now they all have the same description, which is not helpful. Right, but it's a great series overview, but what I need is essentially a back cover blurb for each of the 12 and I really struggle with this and I know a lot of writers do because when I was writing my kids' books, I must have written those back cover blurbs easily, a dozen times easily, and they, I'm sure it could still be better.

[0:04:02.0] TG: Hold on, when you use the word blurb, I hear getting a like another author, famous person to give a testimonial for the back cover of your book, that does not sound like what you're talking about?

[0:04:14.0] VF: No. You know when you're in a bookstore and you flip over or you look at the inside flap, if it's a hardcover, when you look at the back of the book and you want to try and grab the reader into the book, the book description.

[0:04:28.0] TG: Yeah. What do you call the, the little testimonials from other authors on books, author testimonials. Oh, those are called blurbs. That's what I've always heard them called. I don't, well I don't want to get into it. I just, that's weird. I've never heard it. I've always heard blurbs are like, like on my book I had a blurb from Steve Pressfield, Ryan Holiday, those.

[0:04:50.0] VF: Right. It's Canadian English and American English.

[0:04:54.0] TG: Yeah, I was like, I thought for weeks, okay, she just wants to know how to get famous people to give her a blurb for a book.

[0:05:01.0] VF: No, but if you have advice, well, we can talk about that too because that would also be great.

[0:05:07.0] TG: Yeah. Okay. So write the book description for the back of the book, go, I'm ready.

[0:05:14.0] VF: All right. How do I do it? There's my question.

[0:05:21.0] TG: So this is interesting. I don't know that I've ever written one of these. Most of the books I worked with, their publisher did it and then the self-published authors did it themselves. And then I've always gotten other people to write mind after reading it. So like Shawn Coyne wrote the one for Running Down a Dream. And I just edited it. So you know, you're going to take a different approach, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, right?

So nonfiction would be very much, you know, here's what your, here's the problem, here's what you're going to learn. It's basically a shortened sales letter for the book. And the way that I've always heard people talk about and of the ones I've seen that are useful, they almost read like movie trailers, right? So it's like setting up the story, setting up the story, setting up the setting, and then just trying to make it as compelling as possible.

So you don't want to describe the story, you know, this is a story set in such and such time was such and such, whatever. Like it needs to leave again, like a movie trailer where it gives you something of the book while just leaving you wanting more. That doesn't feel very helpful as I said that though.

[0:06:42.0] VF: Here's why I think they're so hard for authors to write them for themselves. And this is just a theory I have. It’s because we're so close to our own story that it's really hard to boil it down. One, it's hard to boil it down to the essentials two, it's really a sales tool isn't it?

[0:07:00] TG: It is. It's a sales tool. But I think the first reason is why it's harder, right? So I could sell you on reading Jurassic Park, you know what I mean? Like it's this awesome story that combines science and dinosaurs in a way. And it's like a thriller. Like I could probably write the, you know, within an hour write good back cover copy for it because it's not my book and I love the book. But yeah, for your own, you're so close to it.

The parts that are interesting to you are not usually the parts that are interesting to the reader. One of the things, especially with the current novel I'm working on and then Running Down a Dream, is there were so many different drafts that are all in my head. I don't think I'll ever really understand what the final book is. So I don't know. I mean, and then you have the interesting problem of 12 different ones, which I don't think you necessarily, cause I'm trying to think like is this a series where you could drop in on book six and be just fine?

[0:08:06.0] VF: No, no, it's one story but in 12 parts. So you have to start with part one and go all the way through to the end.

[0:08:13.0] TG: So why can't you just have the basic, the basic like basically the same copy on the back of each one?

[0:08:19.0] VF: Well, I can have that. That's what I have right now.

[0:08:22.0] TG: Why is that a problem?

[0:08:24.0] VF: Well, I think it's useful, but to a point. I think I need to have in addition to that private, maybe not instead of it, but in addition to it, talk a little bit about what happens in that particular part as a way of compelling the reader to keep moving through the story without giving away any spoilers. Of course. Because with the 12 parts, you can go on Amazon and see all 12 parts you don't want, you know, part number 12 to give away the end. Right?

The summary of the, the book summary did give away the, the whole story, but it just looks weird to have 12 books with exactly the same copy with nothing there to give us a sense of how the story is moving or what happens in that particular book or what the, the crisis is or the what the, you know, if the stakes are getting higher or what, it just looks weird. And I think, I'm thinking it's a missed opportunity.

[0:09:20.0] TG: So what you could do is have, I'm trying to think of things I've seen before. So like at the top you could say this is probably horrible for your particular book, but you'll get the gist, the thrilling story of such and such character continues and part five of the Masquerade series. And then it's like, and I don't think you need to, you know, we've talked about this, the show The Punisher and I was always really careful when I, when I was binge watching it not to even look at the little screenshots of future episodes because that would tell me if some somebody was going to survive until that episode. Right?

Like, I think it's okay that you say now that our, you know, now that the character has reached this point, they now face this challenge. And like that's the description of the book is like here's what happened in last episode, here's what's coming in this one. And not worry too much about spoilers because at the same time, like if somebody is looking at books six to me, most people looking at book six or looking at it because they just read book five. So I think it's fine to, to put something that might be a spoiler.

If somebody that hasn't read book one comes across or something where it basically is like selling this. It's almost like selling the episode, right? So continuing the saga of such and such character, now that the character has done X, they now face the next challenge. They now face Y are now, you know, Z has come along and they have to overcome this. I don't really know what each book is about, but that's kind of, but as you can see, I have very little experience doing this kind of stuff. So I'm struggling a little bit to give specific advice.

[0:11:15.0] VF: Okay. Maybe what I'll do is, I mean cause I don't want to take away what I have because that is if someone happens to come across say book six, the little summary of what the whole story is about is great. Right? Like it like when I combine all 12 and a print book or I bundle all 12 as a one digital eBook, which I plan to do. I'm only going to use that blurb that I have currently because it's a really nice setup for the whole story.

[0:11:45] TG: So I don't, on the back of each one you put, in kind of big letters at the top, the story of whatever the character's name is, continues in book six. And then off short like two to three sentence description of that book, the crisis in that book and then below that a section that's like about the masquerade series and then you have the description of the whole series. 

Okay. I mean that sounds right to me, but again you're asking me a question I would never in a million years claim to be an expert on.

[0:12:25.0] VF: All right. So I will go with that and we'll see what happens, if it works or not. I mean that's the only way we're going to find out. Right? Just to test it and see what happens.

[0:12:35] TG: Well what do you mean works? How will you know if it works? See that's the problem.

[0:12:39.0] VF: Oh God, I hate it when you ask me questions like this.

[0:12:44.0] TG: Okay, well I want to catch, I want to catch assumptions. Assumptions is that there was some way to test this. So I mean this is the constant issue with like books, is really, it would be a really nice, I wish there was like a bookstore somewhere that would allow you to pay a fee to put your book out with four different covers and like figure out which one sold more copies at the end of the week. Right?

But a publisher would never allow that. But that's the way that you would pick a cover because there's no other way to actually real world test a cover. And I would say the same thing about book blurbs is you're also dealing with such a small segment, right? So you're dealing with like, okay, here's you know, a group of people that have heard of the Masquerade series or here's a group of people that are searching Amazon and finds the Masquerade series kind of randomly not knowing who you are.

Now, here's a much smaller group of people that landed on some other book other than the first one. And then here's an even smaller group of those people that took the time to intricately read the description of the book. You know what I mean? So like my point is not so much like you got to test it and see, cause when you say tested it's like, well there's really no way to test it other than like write four different versions and try to set up a scenario where you're selling four different versions of the book to enough people that you get a statistically a, what is it called? It's like where the, you've tested it with enough people that the stats actually matter. I forgot what that's called. Statistically significant. Maybe.

Anyway, and the what you're testing for is so small, it's not worth it. Cause even if you get it perfect is going to increase your conversion rate by 0.03%. So my thing on this stuff is usually just write something that feels right and then put it out there and move on with your life.

[0:14:53.0] VF: Because the only way, I'm just thinking about what you're saying here now, the only way for me to test something like this would be with the focus group, which is the old way of doing marketing.

[0:15:05.0] TG: Yeah. Focus groups aren't real, right? Right. The only way to cleanly test, like a sales page would be to take you know, thousand people and show half of them one sales page and half of them the other and figure out what converts more and using sales pages as an example, you'll see these arguments between people whether or not green buttons convert better than red buttons. But the issue is that most of us are not, you know, we're not Amazon where a slot, you know, a tick up of 0.05% is legitimate money. Right.

You know, if I do something that converts at 0.05% more, that probably actually doesn't make me any more money. Right? So I could conceive of a way to test the back cover copy to see if it converts to sales better, but it would be expensive, long and annoying and not worth the return on that investment. Does that make sense?

[0:16:09.0] VF: So I'm focusing on something that doesn't need to be focused on?

[0:16:13.0] TG:  Right, I don't think it's bad to look at it and say, look, I think I could do this better. But the important thing is to like, okay, we've got a plan. You know, it's going to be like what we said with like a header, short description and then series description. I'm going to do that, I'm going to put it on the back of the books and then I'm going to forget about it because getting on three more podcasts, we'll sell more books than tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking the back cover copy.

[0:16:42.0] VF: Okay. So then how do I get people to Blurb my book?

[0:16:47.0] TG: Okay, now you're using the word correctly. So, yeah, that's what I was, I was thinking you were asking which, and I would, I would actually put book blurbs. There's a, it's so funny cause inside of publishing, cause I've been in all these meetings, there's always dislike overemphasis. It seems like people fall into one or two camps. They think getting great blurbs is the most important thing in the world or they think it's completely useless.

And so, and of course nobody's actually done a study, you know, to me this is what a publisher should be doing. A big five publisher could take one of their big books of the year, publish a version with blurbs and publish a version without blurbs. Just have two ISBNs. And they could easily tell whether or not they matter. And it would be a pain in the ass for that one book. But then they would know for all the rest of the books that they publish, whether or not actually convert sales or not.

Because you will hear anecdotal stuff. Like, I've picked up a book and looked at it and given it a shot because I saw Seth Godin blurbed it, you know what I mean? So I kind of look at blurbs from the author's standpoint from a couple different standpoints or a couple of different views.

The first is I am hoping that I can align myself with authors that, um, people, you know, for Running Down a Dream, it was like, you know, people that likes Steve Pressfield would probably like my book. So his is the blurb I put on the cover of the book, the front cover of the book, because I'm hoping people will give my book a shot if they like Steve Pressfield. So that's one standpoint is like, okay, I want to get somebody who aligns with my book in some way. Right? So I worked with an author who had written a book about Afghanistan and she got a general from Afghanistan to write a blurb, right?

So it was like this nice kind of, this person understands Afghanistan, therefore you should trust him when he says, you should read my book. So in your case, I would try to get as big of a name of as possible in the women's fiction world. But the other side of getting blurbs that I think people overlook that I know can be helpful is that it opens up doors for you. So Ryan Holiday blurred my last book. So I have gone out to people that have reviewed Ryan Holiday's books and said, Hey Ryan Blurbed my book. You might like it; can I send you a copy? And they respond. So I learned this trick years ago.

My friend Ramit Sethi, he worked for a company called PB Wiki. This was probably over a decade ago, and he was their marketing director and he worked really, really hard, you know, worked all of his contacts and blah blah blah and got their company covered in The New York Times. And he, the day that it happened, he was so excited and they saw no real uptick in traffic to their website from a New York Times article. But then a few weeks later he realized if he went back to all those outlets, all those media outlets that wouldn't interview him or talk about their product and said, hey, we were just written up in The New York Times, they were much more likely to say yes to covering the product now.

So I've found blurbs can be really helpful from that standpoint where you can use the association with the person to open up doors that you can open up because nobody knows who you are. So that makes sense?

[0:20:40.0] VF: Yes. But I'm wondering how to get that first blurb.

[0:21:45.0] TG: Yeah, so the biggest thing that I've found to do is, just ask, this is just like we've talked about with some of the outreach stuff, it's usually just best to ask. And so there's different ways to go about this. When you're, a lot of times, you know, I'll talk to authors and they're like, how did that, you know, there's this author that came out, it's their first book, nobody's heard of them, and they got Stephen King to, to blurb their book. How did that happen?

Well, I would almost guarantee that if you looked, they either had the same editor, were published by the same publisher or had the same agent, right? So this is one of the few upsides to having a traditional publisher is it puts you in the mix with people where you can get stuff like that to happen because you're working with the editor who also edited whoever or you're at the same publishing house is this other author. And it is kind of understood that the publishers that if you're a big time all through with a publisher, you're going to blurb x number of books of theirs throughout the year.

So that's one way, but if you're self-published, that's not super helpful. The second way, um, is to work contacts. And this is where what you're doing with your book club makes a lot of sense. Where, let's say we talked about you're doing the book club, you review a book, you've reached out to an author, let them know that you pick their book for your book club. You have a couple emails about that. And then six months later you come back and say, hey, you know, I've got a book, you know that I'm working on. I'm almost done with, I'm looking to do author testimonials or blurbs. Would you be interested? Would you mind if I sent you a copy of the book? Would you be okay with doing a blurb? I totally understand if you don't have time, but they're at least going to respond to you at that point.

And this is why starting up constantly starting up new relationships with other authors puts you in that situation where you have enough people that you've connected to that some of them are going to be willing to blurb your book. So that's another way is to use connections that you've created. And then from there I you can just cold ask people. And my thing is to do it in a very similar way to outreach, which is keep it short and be extremely clear about why you're asking them. So the email should only be a few, you know, four or five sentences long. “Hi, my name is Valerie. I'm the author of the Masquerade series. I'm a big fan of your work. I loved insert whatever the last book was, you know, and because of that, I'm wondering if you'd be open to riding a testament or writing a cover blurb for my book. I'm happy to send you a copy in whatever format makes the most sense to you. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Valerie.”

I think a lot of people write really long verbose emails cause they feel bad asking. And I think if you just directly ask and give a reason why you're picking them over, just the fact that they're like a well-known author, that's your most direct way. But a large majority of them will probably ignore you or say no, but that's okay. If you reach out to 15 different ones, you know somebody will be open to it.

[0:24:23.0] VF So we're circling back again to the same, the same theme and we've talked about this quite a bit, and I suspect we will continue to talk about it quite a bit more. And that is writing and publishing, being a long tail business and doing things now that will pay off in maybe a year's time, maybe a couple of years' time, or maybe you don't really know when they'll pay off or if they'll pay off, but it's about developing relationships with people in the industry, with your peers, other writers or other people in the industry.

Getting to know them, being relentlessly helpful, developing that relationship and then over time creating a rapport whereby you kind of have a leg to stand on when you reach out and say, “Hey, could you help me with, would you, would you be interested in writing a blurb?”

[0:25:13.0] TG: Yeah, I mean a lot of it comes, yeah, a lot of it comes down to exactly that. Like one of my blurbs was from Barbara Corcoran and that's because I did a lot of work for her and helped her out a lot. It's coming up on 10 years ago, but I knew that I never asked her for a favor and I knew that she still had good feelings about me and so I just asked and I honestly, she was the one on the list and I'm like, she'll probably say no, because I worked for right before she became like super famous with the Shark Tank.

So I was like, she'll probably say no, she's too busy and that's totally fine, but hell, I'm just going to ask. And um, and she said yes. And that's because she's like one of the sweetest, most amazing people on the planet anyway. But I think like, but that's the thing is I called in favors, um, every single person that blurbed my book I had interacted with and done something to help them in the past. And so, yeah, it's a long, right.

So, Barbara, I sat on that favor for years, and I wasn't thinking like, okay, I got one favor, I got to use it. It was just like, it was just really like, okay, I know she likes me. I know she's really famous, so if I ever asked for anything, it's gotta be meaningful to me. And maybe she'll say no, and that's totally fine. It's her right to do. But, you know, I called on it.

So I think, you know, making sure, you know, it's that whole thing of like, you do it methodically and with a plan, but never crossing over into the territory where you think somebody owes you something, right?

So you never get into this space where you're like, you're like, Whoa, why would they say no to me after everything I've done for them? You know, or something. You just never get into that territory. But if you help enough, you know, I always come back to the Zig Ziglar quote, which is if you help enough people get what they want out of life, you'll get what you want out of life too.

And so, yeah, I think that's why, I mean, we've talked about it, but building connections with other authors and other influencers is one of the most powerful things that you can do. It just opens up so many doors. And so when you've been actively helping other authors promote their stuff for two or three years, you now have a long list of people that you know, we'll answer your email when you email them.

[0:27:48.0] VF: Right and you're reaching out to help and you're reaching out to develop the relationship because you want to help, not because you want to get something.

[0:27:57.0] TG: Yeah, it's really, it's hard, like it's always hard to talk about because I don't reach out to like random people to try to help them. Like I specifically reach out to people that I think would be helpful for me to know. So there is like a game to it, but I don't have like a secret list of things people I've helped, you know, and how much of a favor they owe me.

[0:28:25.0] VF This is why I like Twitter to be honest. I mean that's just what I use Twitter for. There are people in the industry who I admire and I like the types of things that they're doing and I would like to get to know them just because I, what they're doing and the philosophy they have and the way they approach their business is very much in line with the way I think about the business.

And so I just want to get to know them. There isn't any ulterior motive there at all. But then hopefully over time I may get to meet them, get to know them, maybe even get to work with them.

[0:29:00.0] TG: Yeah. And if you kind of, if you just keep approaching it like that, wrapping it in some sort of um, method or system where you're making sure that you're trying to connect with a couple authors a month, you know, in some way, like we've talked about so that you have, you have helped enough people, then it works out. And again, I mean this all intermingles because this is why I like doing so many podcasts because you are now friends with all the podcasts hosts, right? Right. So it all intermingles and this is why people can get really good blurbs for their books because they had been being a helpful person for long enough that they can reach out for favors.

[0:29:47.0] VF: And this isn't really any different than any other business to be honest. You know, if I think about the career I had before I became a writer, it took me 10 years in the business before I knew everybody that I needed to know, where I could just pick up the phone and, and call, you know, the executive of XYZ company and ask for some advice or ask if he could help me out or keynote speak at an event or whatever. You know, it took that long.

[0:30:12.0] TG Yeah. I mean there's two, there's two things I would say that are different. One's good, one's not so good. The first one is, um, everybody's in the book business because they love books. It's a rare person who's doing this because they think it's going like make them rich or famous or something. Right? Yeah. So most of the people that you interact with are doing it because they love it, which is really fun.

I used to be in the bike industry and it was the same way of like, everybody's in the bike industry because they love bikes. You know, not everybody's in the insurance business because they're passionate about insurance. So I really like it because the percentage of passionate people is really high, which means somebody told me that, you know Michael Hyatt is a well-known author and self-help guy here in Franklin and he said he's never worked in an industry that was so a collaborative where everybody's just willing to help everybody else. And I would say that's true. So that's the good thing.

The downside is when you had that job, it was kind of your responsibility to show up X numbers a week to do your job, to connect with other, like it was kind of built into your job to meet people. Where as a writer it's really easy to just sit in your hole and never network.

[0:31:38.0] VF: That's right. That is the hardest part about this job for me because I'm an extrovert and going out and meeting people and networking was really the only thing I liked about my other job.

[0:31:50.0] TG: Yeah, see, I'm the opposite, I will literally sit in my office and never leave unless like, like I get, you know, I'll get invited to things. I'm like, I don't know. That would mean I'd have to like leave. So, my thing is I go to conferences because then I'm kinda like forced, like we talked about a few weeks ago, it kind of forces me into this networking mentality for a few days.

So like I'm going to two conferences in June and yeah, but doing a keynote presentation at ConvertKit’s, Craft + Commerce. And the reason I got that is because long before he was successful and well known, I was buddies with Nathan Barry and we helped each out do it stuff and now he owns ConvertKit and, and it's like, that's the thing is you also have to hang around long enough so all your friends become successful, you know, and they trust you because you liked them when they weren't successful.

Yeah. So it's like, yeah. And again, like I can't stress enough. Like it's mostly just fun. Like even for an introvert, like getting to meet people that are doing the same thing as you, passionate about the same thing you are. That only turns into good things.

[0:33:17.0] VF: All right. An excuse for me to go out and meet more people. Awesome. All right, well I better get back to writing though.

[0:33:26.0] TG: All right, sounds good.

[0:33:28.0] VF: I will see you next week. Bye.

[0:33:29.0] TG: Yup. Sounds good. Bye.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:33:32.6] TG: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Book Launch Show. For all the past episodes, the show notes, or to connect with me, you can go to booklaunchshow.com. I have dozens of free book marketing resources and articles that you can access at my website booklaunch.com. Lastly, if you like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on Apple Podcast and leaving a rating and review.

Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at booklaunch.com. We will see you next week.

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